| 
Use of enriched uranium in PHWRs proposed
- The Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) and the Nuclear Power Corporation of India Ltd. (NPCIL) plan to use slightly enriched uranium (SEU) in the future 700 MWe Pressurised Heavy Water Reactors (PHWRs) instead of the current technology of using natural uranium as the fuel in all the PHWRs of Indian nuclear programme until now.
- Natural uranium contains only 0.7 per cent of the fissile isotope Uranium-235, the rest being the fertile isotope Uranium-238, which gets converted to Plutonium-239 in the reactor by neutron absorption.
- The SEU, which is being proposed to be used in future 700 MWe PHWRs, will contain 1.1 per cent of U-235.
- The Light Water Reactors (LWRs) of the type being built at Kudankulam and the types that are likely to be supplied by other foreign vendors use low enriched uranium (LEU), which has 3 to 5 per cent U-235 enrichment.
- The advantage of using SEU, according to Mr. Jayaraj, is the higher nuclear burn-up that can be achieved.
- Burn-up is a measure of the amount thermal energy that is extracted from a given amount of nuclear fuel.
Flaw led to claim of faster-than-light
- Researchers have found a flaw in the technical setup of an experiment that startled the science world last year by appearing to show particles travelling faster than light.
- Two separate issues were identified with the GPS system that was used to time the arrival of neutrinos at an underground lab in Italy
- One could have caused the speed to be overestimated, the other could have caused it to be underestimated
- The experiment involved neutrinos being fired from CERN's site on the Swiss-French border to a vast underground laboratory 730 km away at Gran Sasso in Italy.
- Researchers found that the neutrinos appeared to arrive 60 nanoseconds sooner than if they were travelling at light's speed of 299,792 km a second.
- The experiment's margin of error allowed for just 10 nanoseconds. A nanosecond is one-billionth of a second.
Another green initiative from BIAL
- In what could be described as a shot in the arm for the promotion of alterative fuels such as biodiesel in the State, Karnataka State Biofuel Development Board has managed to rope in Bangalore International Airport Ltd. (BIAL) to use biofuel for running its ground vehicles at the airport.
- Bengaluru International Airport is said to be the first airport in the country to run ground vehicles on biofuel.About 10 BIAL ground vehicles are being operated by creating biodiesel blend mixing eco-friendly biooil with petroleum diesel.
War against polio far from over
- Having achieved one full polio-free year, the key challenge now is to ensure that any residual or imported poliovirus in the country is rapidly detected and eliminated.
- The challenge is also to ensure that all children up to 5 years continue to take OPV at every available opportunity (during polio campaigns and routine immunisations) until global eradication is achieved
- The last bastions of polio in India are Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and West Bengal
- On January 13, 2012 India achieved a milestone in the history of polio eradication — a 12-month period without any case of polio being recorded.
- In 2010, there were 42 cases, while as many as 1,50,000 cases were reported in 1985.
- Since the launch of Global Polio Eradication Initiative in 1988, the incidence of wild poliovirus has reduced by 99 per cent
- In 2006, the number of polio-endemic countries (countries that have never stopped indigenous wild poliovirus transmission) was reduced to four — India, Nigeria, Pakistan and Afghanistan.
- One of the three types of wild poliovirus –— wild poliovirus type 2 (WPV2) has been eradicated globally. The last case of WPV 2 was reported from Aligarh in October 1999.
- The two polio-endemic States of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar have not reported any case of polio since April 2010 and September 2010 respectively.
- The transmission of the most dangerous WPV1, which caused 95 per cent of polio in India until 2006, dropped to record low levels in 2010.
- Uttar Pradesh, the epicentre of most polio outbreaks in the country, has not reported any WPV1 case since November 2009.
- The challenge really is to check imported poliovirus because neighbouring Pakistan and Afghanistan have a large number of cases.
Virtual laboratories launched
- In an effort to provide easy access to education in the rural areas, the Human Resource Development Ministry on Thursday launched Virtual Labs — a collection of 91 online laboratories containing hundreds of experiments in nine disciplines of science and engineering.
- It is part of the government's National Mission on Education through Information and Communication Technology (NMEICT), focusing on providing graduate and undergraduate students the facility to perform experiments, using the World Wide Web, a standard computer, and an Internet connection.
- It enables sharing of costly equipment across the country, and in the rural areas, students will be able to perform experiments that they would otherwise not be able to access.
