Ten facts about nuclear weapons and the "Megatons to Megawatts" program

Friday again!

This week that means Bergen, and as (almost) always that means FACTS. This week I want to give you ten facts about nuclear weapons and the "Megatons to Megawatts" project - a little "taster" of what my talk tomorrow will be about (I don't know if there will be a live stream yet, but at least the entire confernce will be filmed, and go on-line later - I will of course share the link when it's ready ;) )

1. nuclear weapons have been used against humans two times; Hiroshima August 6th and Nagasaki August 9th, 1945 - hopefully NEVER again
2. both "Little Boy" and "Fat Man" were fission bombs (getting their energy from fission); "Little Boy" was made of highly enriched uranium (uranium-235), and "Fat Man" was made of plutonium(-239)
3. after WWII a nuclear arms race begun between the US and the Sovjet Union, and at one time there were more than 60 000 nuclear weapons in the world
4. a nuclear weapon is ugly, but by mixing the fissile material in it with uranium or thorium, it can be changed into beautiful nuclear fuel (100% normal nuclear fuel for normal reactors) <3
5. the "Megatons to Megawatts" program was an agreement between US and Sovjet/Russia that lasted from 1993 to 2013, where Sovjet made fuel out of their weapons (unfortunately not all of them) and US bought it
6. during those 20 years (1993-2013), 500 tonnes of highly enriched uranium, from 20 000 Russian nuclear weapons have been converted into nuclear fuel and "burned" in reactors (more than 2 weapons destroyed every day!)
7. the electricity generated from these weapons is the same amount as all the electricity in the US in two years(!)
8. weapons uranium (highly enriched uranium) could be mixed with natural uranium to make fuel (as has been done in the program) - or, even better, with thorium
9. if you mix weapons uranium with thorium, you can also recycle the spent fuel; this means that not only do you get rid of horrible weapons, you also get rid of a lot of nuclear waste (WIN WIN :D )
10. today there are around 16 000 nuclear weapons in the world - much better than 65 000 (or whatever the peak number was), but still that's definitely 16 000 too many...:/

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(I bite my lip when I concentrate - haha)

 Now I'm soon off to NHH, where the conference tomorrow will be held, for sound check, and just "feel" the stage. And when I come back to the hotel again, Anders will be here! I'm so incredibly happy he could join me here in Bergen this weekend!!! We're here until Sunday afternoon, so hopefully we'll have time to actually experience something while we're here - any recommendations from my readers?

Anyway: happy weekend to everyone <3

TBT - Japan

Tonight I just have to do a little "throwback Thursday": I've been going through a lot of my pictures as I've been preparing for Saturday's TEDx (sorry for talking so much about it, but it's pretty much all I've been doing today, and all I can think of ;) ), and suddenly the folder was there - "Sushi&Nuclear" - and I had to take a peek.

In one way it feels like I was never there, and it was all just a dream... 

Of course it wasn't: It was such a great trip, and it would have been fantastic to go back again! 

<3

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Tomorrow I'm off to Bergen, and so far I have almost no clue as to what my outfit will be. I think my slides are almost a little too little pink (I just finished them, and emailed them off to Bergen), so I'm considering to wear pink to sort of balance it out. 

The only thing I'm pretty sure about is that these new, pretty little things from Nelly will be on my feet on Saturday...;) I am considering beige chinos and a pink top (and the shoes, of course) - what do you think?

To know what you don't know...

As scientists I think we always really, really, REALLY want to understand whatever we're working on exactly how and why - but often on our way to the how and the why we step into different problems than the ones we were aiming at solving in the first place... I think we all can relate to saying "I don't know" can be difficult; making you feel like you've in some way failed, right? But maybe just as much as it being no fun feeling like a "failure", it can be very hard to see that knowing what you don't know can also be a result :)

Today we had a moment like this; realizing that what we don't understand, or don't know, is actually an important result in itself - and it is such a great feeling!

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(snaps from Instagram - @sunnivarose)

As earlier promised I'm trying to become better at girly outfit posting, so here's today's and yesterday's outfit: Same sweater - two styles! Yesterday (left picture) I styled it a little bit in the "preppy direction" - with a white shirt and a beige skirt, today more towards laid-back and comfy - with jeans and flats :)

Personally, I must admit I'm becoming more and more fond of the comfy style, and I really love my new, white (all white!) sneakers from Nelly, and the west from Gina Tricot. This west is seriously just perfect these days; on top of a sweater inside if it's a little chilly, or outside if it's suddenly not so chilly - or on top of a thin jacket if it's a tad bit colder outside.

Which look is your favourite?

<3<3<3

Einstein's letter

So, I'm spending a lot of time working on my talk for Saturday these days, and a lot of my preparation is about searching for different kinds of images that I can use in the talk. As I told you on Monday, the title of my talk is "Could nuclear weapons save the planet", and there will of course be some talking about the history of nuclear weapons. 

While searching for one thing, clicking on one link, and then clicking on another link in the first link, I came across this letter that Einstein wrote to President Roosevelt in 1939, when they had just discovered that uranium could fission and release those huge amounts of energy. And they were starting to understand that this could be used for making a very powerful weapon.

I just had to share this with my beautiful readers. This is history!

 

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Anders I came home an hour ago, and we're going to eat some thai curry now. We'll probably watch Big Bang Theory ( <3 ), and after that we'll actually go to sleep - we've come into this mode where we go to bed really early, and get up equally early in the morning...and it feels great!

Tomorrow will be a day with more or less 100% focus on the TEDx talk; I've started on the manuscript, but I'm not even close to where I want to be. Hope it will be good in the end ;)

"Could nuclear weapons save the planet?"

I haven't got through all that I had hoped to today, but at least I have decided on the title for my TEDx talk in just 5 days: Could nuclear weapons save the planet? 

The talk isn't finished yet, but at least I think I'm on the right track... Do you like the title? (No, I won't say anything more about the talk than what's already in the title, but if you're in Bergen on Saturday, you can come to NHH and see the entire conference live). This is my third TEDx talk in two years, and I really really want it to be the best that I can do!

BTW: I think I have decided on which shoes to wear - also an important preparation before a talk ;)

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Facts on Friday (we pretend Monday = Friday) - EXPERIMENTS!

Since I wrote about my feelings about programming on Thursday, I got some comments and questions about how and why; which can be totally ok, but also a little annoying if it's more like "why on earth are you so stupid you're trying to do anything in C++" (no one said exactly that, it's just an example of a not very constructive comment). Like my friend, Anders (not my boyfriend, but my friend who is a boy - haha), said: "With programming you can do everything! (Except for saying out load which language you are using without someone telling you it's wrong.)"

Telling me stuff like "you have to hate yourself for choosing C++" is not exactly helping me (or anyone really), right? I didn't wake up one day and say to my self "hey, I think I want to program C++ for no reason what so ever - just because I enjoy feeling stupid". I need C++. So it's a little bit like telling your kid who is doing his/her algebra homework "you must really enjoy feeling stupid since you're doing this algebra stuff - you should work on statistics instead".

I love getting constructive comments or critique, but some comments are just making me feel more stupid than before (like: not only am I not managing the programming stuff, I'm also an idiot for trying to learn what I am learning...).

So I thought, today I want to give you ten FACTS about experiments and data analysis here at the nuclear physics group in Oslo - which is the main reason why I need any knowledge of programming these days. This is probably the geekiest (and perhaps most "technical") facts post I've had so far...but sometimes you have to be a little geeky, right? ;)

1. The material we want to study can be almost anything - for example uranium, gold, nickel, molybdenum, iron, dysprosium, thorium or plutonium (these are just some examples of what we have experimented with the last couple of years)
2. We make a tiny foil - a target - from the material (almost the size of a small coin), and put this inside all of our detectors
3. There are always at leas two types of detectors for the experiments: Sodium Iodide detectors (they measure gamma rays), and Silicon detectors (they measure particles)
4. The Sodium Iodide detectors are called CACTUS (cause it really looks like a cactus) <3 
5. Sometimes we use more detectors than the gamma detectors (CACTUS) and the particle detectors - for example fission detectors (we used that for my uranium experiment, since uranium-233 fissions like crazy :P )
6. To study the nuclei in the material we bombard the target with tiny particles; protons, deuterons (a proton and a neutron), helium-3 (two protons and one neutron), or helium-4 (two protons and two neutrons - same as an alpha particle :D )
7. When a particle hits a nucleus in our target material, the nucleus gets some extra energy (sort of like it gets heated); then a particle goes out (it can be the same that went in, or it can be another one), and the target nucleus cools again, by sending out gamma radiation
8. The different detectors will detect the different kind of stuff that comes out from the reaction in the target: the gamma detectors detect the gammas, the particle detectors detect the particles (protons, deuterons, helium-3, or alphas), and the fission detectors detect fission - the detection of all these thing are what we talk about as our data
9. Data from the experiments we are performing in Oslo (like my uranium experiment) is typically 10-100 Giga Bytes - so it's kind of a lot 
10. To sort all of these data we need codes/programs that go through everything and checks if there for example was a particle and a gamma that came out of the target at the same time, or maybe it was a particle and a gamma and a fission product, and what were the energies of all this; the particles and the gammas - on the lucky side I don't have write theses sorting codes from scratch, on the other side I have to try to understand someone else's code and logic, which is not always very easy (when I don't understand I'm always sure it's because I'm stupid :/ )

- CACTUS <3 -

The sorting codes, and everything else I'm working on is written in C++, and that's the reason why that's the language I'm working on.

Happy Monday to everyone!

To program or not to program?

I did not at all get through my TO DO list today, and I hate it...:/ (I didn't even get to start at what I had planned on doing.)

I was supposed to read the two papers I'm co authoring, work on my TEDx talk (for Bergen in just a little more than a week - HELP!), get through some of the emails on my endless unanswered emails list, and try to log into the computer that I used for reactor simulations a couple of years ago, to try to get one of the input files that should be there (I'm pretty sure I don't remember the password anymore :( ).

Instead I ended up spending more or less all of the day "programming" - a.k.a. feeling so incredibly stupid. I really want to learn, and be better, but it's hard...I guess maybe I feel the same way about programming that some people do about math.

Tomorrow I have to be better! Not because it in any way is wrong to spend time on trying to work on my programming skills, but because I have deadlines, and right now there is unfortunately no room for anything else than what HAS to be done... Why does everything take so much time, especially things you need to learn like almost from scratch?!? *frustration*  

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Last night we celebrated science and the Norwegian Research Council's Festaften at Oslo Concert Hall. Here are a couple of pictures taken by Yngve Vogt:

- flirting with the boyfriend - 

- discussing with the professor -