And while the ethical implications of cloning and stem cell research are splashed in bold headlines across newspapers everywhere, I thought it odd that many of the ethical issues surrounding IVF had never really been settled–Who pays for it? Should it be regulated? Is prolonged hormone stimulation bad for your health? Should physicians worry about the psychological trauma that often comes with infertility? Are there attendant health problems in children born from IVF? Do “innovative therapies” introduced by IVF clinics constitute human experimentation? Should children of anonymous sperm or egg donors have a right to seek their parentage? Do surrogate parents or gamete donors have parental rights? Should you be able to make decisions about your child’s sex or physical features? All these issues and more are still out there–they’re just not sexy anymore. And I always found it odd that we can debate the morality of cloning or stem cell research in a way that totally cuts off the debates over IVF.

So, long story short, my honors thesis as an undergraduate was a one-hour documentary exploring the links between old and new ethical problems raised by IVF technologies, and pondering the future of high-tech parenting in the US. It was thoroughly a student film, full of rookie shooting and editing. I eventually sold a slightly more polished version of it to an educational distributor, but it certainly was never a mainstream affair. I’ve continued to follow the subject and waited for a long time to see whether someone would come along and work through these issues for a larger audience. And so it is with great anticipation that I await the film Frozen Angels, which deals with precisely these issues, received good reviews at Sundance, and will finally premiere tonight on public television at 10. While some of the debates treated may seem futuristic, I encourage everyone to watch, and remember when you do that the future is now.

But, as anti-nuclear activist Andrew Lichtman speculated, and the Pentagon later refused to confirm or deny, the test may in fact have been intended to simulate the effects of a low-yield nuclear weapon.

For others of you getting nervous right now, New Mexico journalist John Fleck, has done a good job compiling coverage of the event. Click the link and read on.

There’s been a lot of talk recently about the Seymour Hersh article in the New Yorker discussing the White House’ plans for stopping Iran’s nuclear program, which claims:

One of the military’s initial option plans, as presented to the White House by the Pentagon this winter, calls for the use of a bunker-buster tactical nuclear weapon, such as the B61-11, against underground nuclear sites.

Someone at the Seed office asked the question, “Is a nuclear weapon really the only way to destroy an underground bunker?”

I decided to look into it….

I emailed several scientists who’ve worked on the problems surrounding bunker-busting nuclear weapons and asked them, leaving aside moral and political considerations, whether tactical nukes were the only feasible way to destroy an underground facility like the one at Natanz.

Several were out of town, but the general consensus among those who responded was that collapsing a reinforced underground bunker facility with conventional weapons is difficult, if not impossible.

“I suspect repeated attacks with penetrating [conventional] weapons would be needed,” said Michael May, a former director of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, one of the US’ three nuclear weapons labs.

“If the goal is to actually destroy any equipment buried 75 feet or more below hardened concrete, then it is correct that no conventional weapon would be able to do that,” said Robert Nelson, a physicist at Princeton and senior scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists.

In either case, both agreed that conventional weapons could be used to collapse entrances and exits to a bunker facility, effectively sealing it off.

“Conventional weapons could at least render the site inoperative by cutting off the electricity, access and other connections,” said May.

So what would a nuclear bunker buster do to an underground bunker that a conventional one won’t?

“Nuclear weapons detonated on the ground would likely fracture or spall the concrete reinforcement,” wrote May. “Depending on the yield, the crater could engulf some of the facility itself. Any sensitive equipment within a hundred meters or more, again depending on yield, would probably be destroyed. The local fallout would deny access to the area for some time, perhaps weeks or months or longer, depending on yield and workers’ tolerance of radiation levels. There would also be more distant fallout.”

There are a number of problems with using bunker-busting nuclear weapons. First of all, collapsing a buried and reinforced bunker takes a relatively direct hit. But the intelligence we have on most underground bunkers merely indicates where the entrances, exits and ventilation shafts are, which give scant clues, at best, to the location of the bunkers themselves.

Furthermore, the idea that bunker-busters burrow down deep before exploding is misleading. The weapons are designed to penetrate the ground, but relative to the depths at which bunkers can be placed, bunker-busters actually don’t bury themselves very deep before exploding. Not deep enough, anyway, to contain the ensuing explosion that vents to the surface spreading plenty of fallout, which can disperse over a distance of up to 1000 miles.

Articles by May (with then-grad student Zachary Haldeman) and Nelson from a 2004 issue of the journal, Science and Global Security, also debunk the idea that nuclear weapons could be used to neutralize bioweapons or chemical weapons stored in bunkers.

While nuclear explosions get very hot and emit a lot of radiation, they do it in an exceedingly brief window. In bunker busting conditions, a tactical nuke would apparently be sufficient only to sterilize biological warfare agents within at best a 10-30 meter radius (May and Haldeman). That’s not much margin for error, suggesting the need for targeting information far more specific even than what it would take to collapse the bunker in the first place.

Furthermore, many chemical warfare agents would remain relatively unaffected, requiring high temperatures for far longer sustained periods for neutralization. And, in both cases, much of whatever chemical or biowarfare agents were left undestroyed would be vented into the atmosphere, causing a threat larger even than the direct effects of the nuclear weapon.

Of course, a uranium enrichment facility like Natanz doesn’t deal with biological or chemical weapons. But the uranium processed there has been converted into gaseous form for centrifugation. So I asked, what would have if that vented into the atmosphere?

“I don’t know how much UF-6 there is at Natanz, but in any case it would be a small contribution to total radioactivity and a very small one to any nuclear explosion fallout. Uranium has a very long half-life and is only mildly radioactive. On the other hand, UF-6 is chemically corrosive and uranium, like other heavy metals, is not a good thing to breathe in the first place,” said May.

Note: For more information, I recommend this presentation from the Union of Concerned Scientists, which Dr. Nelson helped put together. The preceding image is taken from this animation.

Up until recently, the market for solar energy has been somewhat stagnant, and the technology’s relatively poor efficiency–around 14 percent–might be attributed to lack of market demand. It occurs to me, though, that the new appetite for solar may be part of a larger trend away from centralized sources of power.

Big power grids are inherently inefficient, since all the cabling necessary to farm out the electricity generated at a large centralized power plant to far-flung consumers is the source of a lot of electrical resistance. A little over 7 percent of the power generated in the US is lost during transmission and distribution because all the electrical resistance caused by power lines converts electrical energy into heat, which dissipates without doing any useful work. That’s a huge waste. And it gets worse every year as suburbs expand and people continue building further outward from central power plants.

But renewable sources of energy have a big advantage here. In addition to being sustainable and less polluting than combustible sources of electricity like oil and coal, many renewable energy sources can be located at the site of consumption. Solar arrays are often placed at the location they are intended to power. And the same can be done with wind generators. Other experimental renewable sources of energy like tidal and wave power also lend themselves to small power grids, if not on-site production.

US industry seemed to lose interest in gas cooled pebble bed nuclear reactors, like the one being tested in South Africa, when it became clear that they were better suited for smaller power grids. They don’t appear to be tailored for our current model of huge unwieldy power grids.

But as energy security becomes more important to the US, and scarce resources force us to look more carefully at issues of power efficiency and conservation, it seems likely that decentralized power will look more and more attractive to Americans. Of course, business interests are still aligned on the side of centralized power, but if tech startups and entrepreneurs with new sensibilities like the ones mentioned in the Times succeed, the market for sustainable energy may begin to shift dramatically and the technologies themselves may greatly improve.

When the plans for the new moon missions were unveiled, many journalists and space enthusiasts were disappointed. The plans looked nearly identical to the Apollo missions of thirty years before. It was as if Chevy had announced its new 2006 models and rolled out a ’76 Nova. Thirty years on, shouldn’t a moon mission look slicker, different, better?

What the people making this criticism have failed to appreciate is that engineering projects suffer from what’s been termed “virtual disarmament.”

The term comes from anthropologist Hugh Gusterson’s paper on weapons science, “The Virtual Weapons Laboratory.” When the nuclear program stopped testing and designing atomic weapons, many weapons designers retired or found other work–and as a result the country has literally “forgotten” how to design the more sophisticated nuclear warheads. The same thing has happened to NASA since the end of the space race. Science and engineering programs–particularly complex ones–require a concentration of expertise, which is unsustainable the second a project is over. NASA’s accelerated design pace over the first two decades of the space race may have been necessary to match the Russians blow for blow, but it was equally important in keeping intact a brain trust of scientists, engineers and technicians.

At the end of the space race, these people dissipated, and the numbers of those who were trained to take their place diminished. Even the team maintaining the shuttle shrank from 3,000 to 1,800 between 1981 and the time of the Columbia disaster. The return to the moon is a retread, but a necessary one. A new team of experts must be assembled and must retrace the learning curve of the early space program in order to regain the collective experience that has been lost. What’s just now beginning to be appreciated is the extent to which the Apollo retread will put other nations like China and India on surprisingly equal footing with the U.S. in the new space race.

It was an incredibly ambitious study. The problem, of course, is that this is impossible to test. I’m not arguing for or against the efficacy of intercessory prayer here, lest people from either camp jump on my case. But seriously, doesn’t rigorous scientific testing defeat the very idea of faith? As one best-selling religious text puts it, isn’t faith itself supposed to be the “evidence of things unseen?” I tend to think studies like this are insulting to scientists and religious people alike.

One of my favorite papers from grad school was a paper by John T. Chibnall, Joseph M. Jeral and Michael A. Cerullo in the Archives of Internal Medicine, called “Experiments on Intercessory Prayer,” which details the litany of difficulties – no, impossibilities – involved in designing a clinical trial for intercessory prayer.

The people doing trials of the efficacy of prayer argue passionately that they should be taken seriously by the scientific community. The Chibnall paper reads like Swift’s “A Modest Proposal” in that it takes the rather ludicrous idea of scientifically testing prayer so seriously one can’t help but laugh. Here’s a great excerpt detailing difficulty of identifying testable variables:

Is the amount of prayer important? Is the type of prayer important? The form? The duration? The frequency? The level of fervency? The entity to whom it is directed? The number of prayers per unit of time? Does the number of intercessors matter? Does a team vs. individual intercession matter? Does the faith tradition of the intercessor and/or intercessee matter? Does the power of the intercessor matter? Do the beliefs and/or experiences of the intercessor and/or intercessee matter? Does the worthiness of the intercessor and/or intercessee matter?

The list, unfortunately, generated questions of its own: If type or form is important, just how many types or forms are there? On what basis would you distinguish them? If “fervency” is important, how would you ever measure it to be able to manipulate it? The same is true if the power or worthiness of the intercessor is important: how would you ever measure them?

The paper goes on to ask, if God is a rational actor with a mind of Her own, whether you could expect a direct geometric relationship between quantities of prayer and divine intervention. You get the point. They conclude early on that studies of intercessory prayer are a bad idea. I suppose there are different ways to read the paper, but to me the authors seem pretty tongue-in-cheek throughout, which I love. Thank God for skeptics.