Fifty years of atomic energy
K.S. Parthasarathy
While fiddling with the switches of a mini telephone exchange, Mr M. Sundaram heard a strange request from behind, "Will you please connect me to Mr Nehru, I want to talk to him urgently". He was aghast! He did not know Panditji’s number. Even if he knew, he did not know how to connect!

UNDERSTANDING THE UNIVERSE
WITH PROF YASH PAL
We know that ozone is formed by action of sunlight on molecular oxygen. Why can we not fill up the ozone hole by some method because oxygen and sunlight are both present on earth?

‘Talking windscreens’
Arvinder Kaur
There’s some good news for those using mobile phones while driving. Already wary of the discerning eye of the law, they can heave a sigh of relief thanks to a new device called “talking windscreen”, which reduces the risk of accidents to a large extent.

New products & discoveries

Fifty years of atomic energy
K.S. Parthasarathy

While fiddling with the switches of a mini telephone exchange, Mr M. Sundaram heard a strange request from behind, "Will you please connect me to Mr Nehru, I want to talk to him urgently". He was aghast! He did not know Panditji’s number. Even if he knew, he did not know how to connect!

He was a draftsman and not a telephone operator. A security guard helped him. Dr Homi Bhabha informed Pandit Nehru that the swimming pool reactor erected on one side of the Trombay Hill has been made "critical." That was on August 4, 1956.

On January 20, 1957, Pandit Nehru formally opened the Atomic Energy Establishment at Trombay and named the reactor "Apsara" — a beautiful celestial damsel or a water nymph, as he then described.

Apsara was the first nuclear reactor in Asia outside the then USSR. The birth of Apsara sent a clear message to the world that India, which missed the industrial revolution, could not afford to lose the atomic revolution. Later, Indian engineers and scientists constructed and commissioned six research reactors (CIRUS, Zerlina, PURNIMA, DHRUVA, Fast Breeder Test Reactor and KAMINI.).

This year the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) is celebrating its golden jubilee. Just out of curiosity, I read the Annual Report of the Atomic Energy Commission for the year 1953-54. The twelve-page, colourless document is a far cry from the scintillating, multicoloured, 80 page, glossy, Annual Report of DAE for 2002-03. But the 1953-54 booklet is also packed with information.

It highlighted the need "to set up an atomic reactor for the purpose of studying the technical problems involved in the generation of useful atomic power". Let me hasten to add that the first nuclear power reactor in the world started operation in the USA in 1957.

The report foresaw the need to set up and rapidly expand strong metallurgical and engineering divisions in two years. The nature of the problems is novel and unusual. "All men with conventional metallurgical and engineering training and experience will have to be recruited who will eventually master the new fields by working for the Commission", the report concluded. Not surprisingly, the programmes went on track.

When I joined the department, we did not have any nuclear power plant. Now we have 14. Their total capacity is 2720 MWe. We mine our own uranium; fabricate fuel elements and operate indigenously constructed nuclear power reactors. We mastered the technology to reprocess spent fuel and to manage radioactive wastes. The budget of the DAE grew from Rs 1 million in 1948-49 to over Rs 70000 million now.

Currently, the percentage of nuclear electricity in India is modest; but nuclear power is poised to grow by over 4460 MWe in the next few years. The new projects include two water moderated, water cooled reactors of 1000MWe from Russia and six pressurised heavy water reactors (two of 540 MWe each and four of 220 MWe each). Recently, the Central Government gave approval to construct India’s first Prototype Fast Breeder Reactor of 500MWe at Kalpakkam. This will be a marvellous piece of engineering.

In the early fifties very little of nuclear technology appeared even in international journals. Starting with uranium analysis, Indian scientists specialised in analytical chemistry, spectroscopy, ore extraction, ore dressing and chemical metallurgy among other fields.

They developed from scratch an enviable array of frontier technologies and tools These include nuclear electronics, robotics, vacuum technology, industrial radiography, ultrasonics and in service inspection systems for reactor internals, radiation processing of food, computer based systems, lasers, accelerators, super conducting magnets and related accessories.

They now produce sufficient quantities of heavy water. In 1998, they exported 100 tonnes of nuclear grade heavy water valued at $ 22.75 million and heavy water standards costing $ 35,800 to South Korea. In 1948, Dr Bhabha, the visionary had proposed that we should manufacture heavy water "on the one hand for our own requirements in a pile and on the other for sale to other countries".

These developments took time. In some instances, there was too much delay. May be there are justifiable reasons for this. When you aim at a million, you should not be discouraged if you lose by a few thousand!

Nuclear technology brought out many spinoff technologies. At this very moment, specialists are treating hundreds of cancer patients in over 200 Indian hospitals with radiation. For this, the Board of Radiation and Isotope Technology (BRIT), a Unit of DAE, supplies radioisotopes such as cobalt-60, caesium-137 and iodine137 as applicable. For many cancers, radiation therapy is an essential mode of treatment. Bhabha Atomic Research Centre(BARC) provided hundreds of medical physicists to serve cancer hospitals.

I recall two unforgettable events in my career. The loading of the first indigenously fabricated cobalt-60 source at Seth Vadilal Sarabhai Hospital in Ahmedabad and the commissioning of the first cobalt-60 teletherapy unit in Rajasthan. We completed the work in time. At both places I saw poignant scenes. Dozens of patients, many from faroff places, were waiting for treatment. BRIT now fabricates cobalt-60 sources routinely.

Physicians at the Radiation Medicine Centre, Mumbai, alone carry out about 8000 radiodiagnostic investigations and 9000 radioimmunoassays annually. Though such facilities are relatively few in India compared to advanced countries, nuclear medicine professionals carry out work of very high quality.

When you eat a dosa or idli from anywhere in Maharashtra, chances are that the urad dal in them came from mutation breeding, a promising technology from BARC. BARC scientists developed 23 different crop varieties, which included groundnut and blackgram.

I believe that worldwide there will be a new dawn for nuclear power. With this renaissance, there will be more demand for specialists in nuclear technologies. Twenty years from now, India may export nuclear technologists to advanced countries, which had more or less wound up their nuclear engineering programmes and had turned away from nuclear power.

UNDERSTANDING THE UNIVERSE
WITH PROF YASH PAL

Ozone is created, as you say, by the action of sunlight, particularly the hard ultraviolet, on molecular oxygen in the upper reaches of the atmosphere. The atoms of oxygen released in the process combine with molecules of oxygen to form ozone. These processes go on, along with the processes of destruction of ozone. This destruction occurs through collisions and through absorption of the ultraviolet that would otherwise reach us on the ground.

You must grant that it would be meaningless to talk of buoyancy of the object if it is firmly cemented to the bottom of the bucket. That would be like expecting buoyancy to act on the bottom plate of the bucket itself. When there is no immersion of the object there is no buoyancy.

‘Talking windscreens’
Arvinder Kaur

There’s some good news for those using mobile phones while driving. Already wary of the discerning eye of the law, they can heave a sigh of relief thanks to a new device called “talking windscreen”, which reduces the risk of accidents to a large extent.

Drivers are four times more likely to have an accident if they use a mobile phone on the road. But using a “talking windscreen” rather than a traditional mobile phone while driving could reduce the risk and help prevent accidents, according to a new research carried out at Oxford University.

The researchers say that participants in their experiments found it easier to divide their attention between eye and ear if relevant sources of information came from the same direction.

A three-dimensional graphic scene of the outside world was presented on a screen in front of the windshield in real time. Participants were asked to perform a listening and speaking task while simultaneously driving around suburban and inner city roads.

Two loudspeakers, one placed directly in front of them and one on the side, alternately played words that participants were asked to repeat, a task known as shadowing.

People found it much easier to combine the driving and shadowing tasks if the voice they were listening to came from the loudspeaker directly placed in front of them, rather than from the side — the way drivers hold a mobile phone to their ear, the release says.

That people should find it much easier to look and listen in the same direction is perhaps not surprising given that humans have evolved to deal with sights and sounds that usually originate from the same place, the researchers say.

Dr Spence says: “the results highlight an important factor limiting a driver’s ability to do more than one thing at once. However, there are some measures that car designers could introduce to increase safety, such as flat screen loudspeakers placed by the windscreen in front of the driver.” — PTI

New products & discoveries

Do you ever feel like the weather is out to get you? All week long, it seems, you sit inside while the sun shines outside. Then, as soon as the weekend comes, the sky turns gray. There’s rain in the forecast.

In some ways, you may be right. Weekend weather differs from weekday weather in certain places, say researchers who studied more than 40 years of weather data from around the world. They focused on temperature differences between daytime highs and nighttime lows. This difference measurement is called the diurnal temperature range, or DTR.

Part of the study involved 660 weather stations in the continental United States. At more than 230 of these sites, the average DTR for Saturday, Sunday, and Monday was different from the average DTR for Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday, the researchers found. The difference was small — only several tenths of a Celsius degree-but the pattern was striking enough to make the scientists take notice.

A microbe that thrives in boiling water and "breathes" iron has stretched the limits of where scientists believed life could exist.

The bacteria-like organism lives in a hellish undersea environment where boils out from underwater vents called black smokers. There is no light, the pressure of the water would instantly crush anything living on land and the water is loaded with toxic chemicals, according to a report.

The discovery suggests that life could exist on planets very different from the earth. It also suggests that life did not always evolve in the ways biology teaches — in warm, soupy waters bathed in sunlight on the planet’s surface. — Reuters

The world’s highest and most spectacular mountains, the Himalaya of Nepal, India, and Bhutan, are built on the foundations of a much older mountain system, University of Arizona geoscientists have discovered.

They have dated rocks that show earth’s mightiest range is predated by ancestral mountains that existed in the same area between 450 million and 500 million years ago, long before India began plowing northward into Asia 55 million years ago.

Their findings not only revise ideas on the region’s tectonic history, they offer new insight on connections between uplift of the Himalaya during the past 55 million years and simultaneous global shifts in seawater chemistry and climate.

Physicists at a European particle accelerator say they’ve spotted a never-before-seen elementary particle composed of five of the fundamental constituents known as quarks and antiquarks. In contrast, protons and neutrons contain three quarks, and no particle is known to have four quarks. The new report marks only the second sighting ever of a five-quark particle, the first one having been found last summer by three independent groups working in the United States, Japan, and Russia

The detection of this second so-called pentaquark bolsters the theoretical hunch that a family of five-quark particles exists, says Gunther M. Roland of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), a member of the team that spotted the newest particle. Physicists expect others in the new particle family, like these initial two members, to consist of four quarks and one antiquark.