Dr. Sanjay Gupta reports on new research showing that beyond weight gain, sugar can take a serious toll on your health, worsening conditions ranging from heart disease to cancer.
Read the transcript and more in the Alzheimer's Reading Room.
Showing posts with label 60 minutes. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 60 minutes. Show all posts
Monday, April 02, 2012
Sunday, November 20, 2011
60 Minutes Interview with Christine LaGarde (Video and Transcript)
Christine Lagarde is an accomplished lawyer who became the first female finance minister of France and is now the first woman to run the International Monetary Fund.
She took over the IMF in July after a sex scandal forced her predecessor, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, to resign.
At nearly six feet tall with her striking silver hair, Lagarde's physical presence is as formidable as her reputation. She'll need those attributes and then some to keep the overwhelming debts of countries like Greece and Italy from setting off a worldwide recession.
We interviewed Christine Lagarde Friday, at the end of another turbulent week for world markets.
Monday, November 14, 2011
60 Minutes Congress Trading Stock on Inside Information? (Video)
Steve Kroft reports that members of Congress can legally trade stock based on non-public information from Capitol Hill.
To see the video and transcript go here.
All American Investor
Congress Trading Stock on Inside Information? (Video, Transcript)
Steve Kroft reports that members of Congress can legally trade stock based on non-public information from Capitol Hill.
If you don't see the video go here.
Sunday, April 26, 2009
60 minutes Clean Coal Dilemma Over Coal Generated Power (Video and Text)
The Dilemma Over Coal Generated Power
The future of our climate might be summed up in one question: what do we do about coal? Coal generates nearly half the electricity in the United States and the world. But it's the dirtiest fuel of all when it comes to carbon dioxide, or CO2, the leading greenhouse gas.
A few days ago, the Obama administration declared, for the first time, that CO2 is a threat to human health and it plans to impose limits. But making coal safe will come at an astronomical cost.
After the economy, this could be the biggest debate in Washington. One of the most influential people in this is Jim Rogers. Coal has made Rogers and his company rich and that's why we were surprised to hear what this high flying power baron has to say about what coal does to the environment.
Rogers wanted 60 Minutes to see America's enormous dependency on coal, so he flew correspondent Scott Pelley out to see one of his 20 coal burning power plants.
"I remember the first time I took a helicopter and looked down on a power plant like this. I was 41 years old and I said, 'Oh my goodness, I'm responsible for that!'" Rogers told Pelley.
Rogers is the CEO of Duke Energy, the nation's third largest electric utility. His stacks pump 100 million tons of carbon dioxide every year, which makes what comes out of Rogers' mouth so surprising.
"Controlling carbon emissions in the near future is inevitable in your view. This is going to happen," Pelley remarked.
"It’s inevitable in my judgment," Rogers agreed.
"You're one of the biggest polluters in the world when it comes to carbon emissions," Pelley pointed out.
"We're one of the largest emitters. And it tells you how daunting the challenge is that we have in front of us," Rogers replied.
"You know, there are a lot of people many of them in your industry may who you probably know who say that global warming is not a big problem," Pelley said.
"It's my judgment it is a problem," Rogers said. "We need to go to work on it now. And it's critical that we start to act in this country."
Like a reformed tobacco executive, Rogers says we can't survive the emissions his industry creates. He showed 60 Minutes what he means at a North Carolina power station that can light up one and a half million homes.
Rogers told Pelley that particular plant burns roughly 19,000 tons of coal. "That's two train loads. And each train has about 100 cars," he explained.
The fact is, America runs on coal and here's one of the reasons why: the Powder River Basin that stretches across Wyoming and Montana may be the largest coal reserve on Earth. We've got 200 years worth of reserves - cheap, and right under our feet. No wonder coal generates half of our electricity.
But here's the brutal part: coal is twice as dirty as natural gas and puts more carbon dioxide in the air than all of our cars and trucks. In short, we're caught between a rock and a hot place.
"I notice all of this coming out of the stacks. What is that?" Pelley asked.
"That's good news," Rogers said. "When you see a plume comin' out of a stack of a power plant, that's vapor. And it basically says that the emissions have been cleaned."
The power industry spent billions in the 1990's cleaning up much of the sulfur and nitrogen oxides that cause acid rain. But those pollutants are mere drops in a stream of carbon dioxide. Rogers says getting rid of the carbon will require a new federal law to limit emissions and a new technology to clean up coal. At the same time, he says, Duke will transition to more wind, solar and nuclear power.
"Our goal line is substantially to reduce our carbon footprint, to de-carbonize our business, by 2050," he explained.
"Four decades? That's a long time," Pelley remarked.
"Well, it took a hundred years to get to where we are. And we can’t do this overnight," Rogers said.
But Jim Hansen, NASA's top climate scientists, says 2050 is too late. "We will have guaranteed disasters for our children, grandchildren, and the unborn," he said.
Hansen is credited with some of the earliest and most accurate projections of climate change. He thinks Roger's plan leaves the Earth in the oven decades too long.
"We are going to have to phase out emissions from coal within the next 20 years if we hope to prevent climate disasters," Hansen told Pelley.
"Are you saying we can't build any new coal fired power plants in this country?" Pelley asked.
"Absolutely, not only in this country, but in the world. This is not yet understood. We are going to have to have a moratorium on new coal-fired power plants within the next few years and phase out the existing ones over the next 20 years or so if we have to preserve the climate like the one that has existed the last several thousand years," Hansen said.
You know, Jim Rogers will hasten to tell you he does share your sense of urgency," Pelley remarked.
"Well, his plan doesn't match that," Hansen replied.
In fact, right now Rogers is building two new coal plants. "You're talking a great game, but you're building coal-fired power plants," Pelley pointed out.
"I am following through on what is job one for me, making sure my customers have affordable, reliable, clean electricity," Rogers said.
Asked what would happen if we abandoned coal at this point, Rogers said, "We can't abandon coal. We have to find a way to keep it and use it in the future. And that means the ability to clean it up."
Rogers' plan of cleaning it up over 40 years involves something the coal and power industries promote as "clean coal technology." In fact they say we can't live without it.
"And we have to advance new clean coal technologies. If we don't, we may have to say goodbye to the American way of life that we all know and love," an ad for clean coal warned.
It is a seductive idea: cleaning up the carbon would solve everything. And during the presidential campaign both candidates endorsed clean coal.
"This is America - we figured out how to put a man on the moon in 10 years. You tell me we can't find a way to burn coal that we mine right here in the United States of America and make it work," then-candidate Barack Obama said.
Well, they did find a way to make it work. The problem is, clean coal makes putting a man on the moon look easy. The technology is called carbon capture and sequestration. We found the only place you can see it in America - the Basin Electric Power Co-Operative in North Dakota. Basin captures half its CO2, but they didn't build this because of climate change.
Long before anyone heard of global warming, Basin was conceived in the Carter administration to prove that America could use its own fuel - coal - and turn it into natural gas. They had to take the carbon out because it was an impurity.
"Before you started pumping it into the ground, and into the pipeline, where did it come out?" Pelley asked.
"That stack right up there," Floyd Robb of the power cooperative explained.
Carbon capture takes the carbon dioxide, turns it into a liquid and pumps it underground. Virtually everyone agrees, industry, environmentalists and politicians, that this is the only way we know to make coal safe for the planet. But consider taxpayers built this for one and a half billion dollars in the 1980’s. That would be $4 billion today.
Dan Kammen says carbon capture would be an enormous national engineering project. He's a Berkeley physicist and top expert on energy.
"Can enough carbon capture and sequestration facilities like this one be built in time to prevent climate change from coal?" Pelley asked.
"I don't think anyone knows the answer to that precisely. We know we have to try. And we know these facilities do work. Whether we can build enough of them to preserve the coal industry as we know it today I think is a question," Kammen said.
Kammen told Pelley that there are hundreds of coal-fired plants in the United States, and that each one would need to be outfitted with carbon caption sequestration plants.
"What are we talking about here in terms of infrastructure?" Pelley asked.
"So, we're talking about hundreds of billions, to a trillion dollars or so, and every power plant needs to capture its greenhouse gases," Kammen estimated.
Joe Romm thinks a trillion dollars might be optimistic. Romm ran alternative fuel projects in the Clinton administration.
He says the amount of CO2 we're talking about is mind-boggling. "If the world did this at scale, it would be the equivalent amount of CO2 going into the ground as oil now comes out of the ground. So you have to recreate the entire oil delivery infrastructure of the planet, which was built up over a century, just to deal with this CO2," he explained.
Asked if it is practical, Romm told Pelley, "That we don't know yet. No one has ever taken large volumes of CO2 and stuck it in these deep, underground aquifers and then measured and verified that it stays there permanently. I mean, after all if it doesn't stay there permanently, if it leaks out slowly, it's not saving the climate. Remember we've spent 30 years just trying to get one repository for nuclear waste, Yucca Mountain, and we haven't succeeded. Now we're going to need dozens and dozens of repositories for CO2.
"It is not impossible," Duke Energy CEO Jim Rogers argued. "What we need in this country is what I would call a Marshall Plan. We rebuilt the economies of Japan and Germany after World War II. We need to rebuild our economy and transition it to a low carbon economy. We can do that. But it's gonna take trillions of dollars to do it."
Trouble is, there is a Marshall plan today, and it's rebuilding Wall Street. Add to that Congress projection of record federal deficits of a trillion dollars. And it turns out not even the industry that warns of the end of our way of life is paying for it.
Asked how much Duke Energy has invested in carbon sequestration technology so far," Rogers said, "We have not invested any dollars in the technology, per say. We have spent a lot of time and money reviewing and analyzing the various technologies."
"But come on, you admit to being the third largest carbon producer in the United States. You tell me that carbon sequestration is the future, because we can't afford to live without coal. But then you tell me you haven't invested any money in carbon sequestration," Pelley remarked.
"While we haven't spent the money on sequestration technology we spent the time and the energy and we're going to co-invest with the government when this technology evolves," Rogers explained.
If capturing carbon in the U.S. is decades away, consider that China and India now put more carbon in the air than we do and the Chinese are opening coal-fired plants at a rate of one a week. None captures its carbon. Rogers has broken ground on his two new coal-fired plants despite warnings from scientists, like NASA’s Jim Hansen.
"So when Jim Hansen says that to save the planet, we should stop building coal-fired power plants today you say what?" Pelley asked Rogers.
"I say, 'Mr. Hansen, can't get done, won't get done,'" Rogers replied. "We've got to keep our economy going. We've got to make the transition. And I'm gonna do everything I can with the greatest sense of urgency to make the transition. But to do what you ask me to do now is just not doable."
President Obama wants to speed up cleaner technologies by taxing utilities for the carbon they produce. But the idea is meeting some stiff resistance in Congress.
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The future of our climate might be summed up in one question: what do we do about coal? Coal generates nearly half the electricity in the United States and the world. But it's the dirtiest fuel of all when it comes to carbon dioxide, or CO2, the leading greenhouse gas.
A few days ago, the Obama administration declared, for the first time, that CO2 is a threat to human health and it plans to impose limits. But making coal safe will come at an astronomical cost.
After the economy, this could be the biggest debate in Washington. One of the most influential people in this is Jim Rogers. Coal has made Rogers and his company rich and that's why we were surprised to hear what this high flying power baron has to say about what coal does to the environment.
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Rogers wanted 60 Minutes to see America's enormous dependency on coal, so he flew correspondent Scott Pelley out to see one of his 20 coal burning power plants.
"I remember the first time I took a helicopter and looked down on a power plant like this. I was 41 years old and I said, 'Oh my goodness, I'm responsible for that!'" Rogers told Pelley.
Rogers is the CEO of Duke Energy, the nation's third largest electric utility. His stacks pump 100 million tons of carbon dioxide every year, which makes what comes out of Rogers' mouth so surprising.
"Controlling carbon emissions in the near future is inevitable in your view. This is going to happen," Pelley remarked.
"It’s inevitable in my judgment," Rogers agreed.
"You're one of the biggest polluters in the world when it comes to carbon emissions," Pelley pointed out.
"We're one of the largest emitters. And it tells you how daunting the challenge is that we have in front of us," Rogers replied.
"You know, there are a lot of people many of them in your industry may who you probably know who say that global warming is not a big problem," Pelley said.
"It's my judgment it is a problem," Rogers said. "We need to go to work on it now. And it's critical that we start to act in this country."
Like a reformed tobacco executive, Rogers says we can't survive the emissions his industry creates. He showed 60 Minutes what he means at a North Carolina power station that can light up one and a half million homes.
Rogers told Pelley that particular plant burns roughly 19,000 tons of coal. "That's two train loads. And each train has about 100 cars," he explained.
The fact is, America runs on coal and here's one of the reasons why: the Powder River Basin that stretches across Wyoming and Montana may be the largest coal reserve on Earth. We've got 200 years worth of reserves - cheap, and right under our feet. No wonder coal generates half of our electricity.
But here's the brutal part: coal is twice as dirty as natural gas and puts more carbon dioxide in the air than all of our cars and trucks. In short, we're caught between a rock and a hot place.
"I notice all of this coming out of the stacks. What is that?" Pelley asked.
"That's good news," Rogers said. "When you see a plume comin' out of a stack of a power plant, that's vapor. And it basically says that the emissions have been cleaned."
The power industry spent billions in the 1990's cleaning up much of the sulfur and nitrogen oxides that cause acid rain. But those pollutants are mere drops in a stream of carbon dioxide. Rogers says getting rid of the carbon will require a new federal law to limit emissions and a new technology to clean up coal. At the same time, he says, Duke will transition to more wind, solar and nuclear power.
"Our goal line is substantially to reduce our carbon footprint, to de-carbonize our business, by 2050," he explained.
"Four decades? That's a long time," Pelley remarked.
"Well, it took a hundred years to get to where we are. And we can’t do this overnight," Rogers said.
But Jim Hansen, NASA's top climate scientists, says 2050 is too late. "We will have guaranteed disasters for our children, grandchildren, and the unborn," he said.
Hansen is credited with some of the earliest and most accurate projections of climate change. He thinks Roger's plan leaves the Earth in the oven decades too long.
"We are going to have to phase out emissions from coal within the next 20 years if we hope to prevent climate disasters," Hansen told Pelley.
"Are you saying we can't build any new coal fired power plants in this country?" Pelley asked.
"Absolutely, not only in this country, but in the world. This is not yet understood. We are going to have to have a moratorium on new coal-fired power plants within the next few years and phase out the existing ones over the next 20 years or so if we have to preserve the climate like the one that has existed the last several thousand years," Hansen said.
You know, Jim Rogers will hasten to tell you he does share your sense of urgency," Pelley remarked.
"Well, his plan doesn't match that," Hansen replied.
In fact, right now Rogers is building two new coal plants. "You're talking a great game, but you're building coal-fired power plants," Pelley pointed out.
"I am following through on what is job one for me, making sure my customers have affordable, reliable, clean electricity," Rogers said.
Asked what would happen if we abandoned coal at this point, Rogers said, "We can't abandon coal. We have to find a way to keep it and use it in the future. And that means the ability to clean it up."
Rogers' plan of cleaning it up over 40 years involves something the coal and power industries promote as "clean coal technology." In fact they say we can't live without it.
"And we have to advance new clean coal technologies. If we don't, we may have to say goodbye to the American way of life that we all know and love," an ad for clean coal warned.
It is a seductive idea: cleaning up the carbon would solve everything. And during the presidential campaign both candidates endorsed clean coal.
"This is America - we figured out how to put a man on the moon in 10 years. You tell me we can't find a way to burn coal that we mine right here in the United States of America and make it work," then-candidate Barack Obama said.
Well, they did find a way to make it work. The problem is, clean coal makes putting a man on the moon look easy. The technology is called carbon capture and sequestration. We found the only place you can see it in America - the Basin Electric Power Co-Operative in North Dakota. Basin captures half its CO2, but they didn't build this because of climate change.
Long before anyone heard of global warming, Basin was conceived in the Carter administration to prove that America could use its own fuel - coal - and turn it into natural gas. They had to take the carbon out because it was an impurity.
"Before you started pumping it into the ground, and into the pipeline, where did it come out?" Pelley asked.
"That stack right up there," Floyd Robb of the power cooperative explained.
Carbon capture takes the carbon dioxide, turns it into a liquid and pumps it underground. Virtually everyone agrees, industry, environmentalists and politicians, that this is the only way we know to make coal safe for the planet. But consider taxpayers built this for one and a half billion dollars in the 1980’s. That would be $4 billion today.
Dan Kammen says carbon capture would be an enormous national engineering project. He's a Berkeley physicist and top expert on energy.
"Can enough carbon capture and sequestration facilities like this one be built in time to prevent climate change from coal?" Pelley asked.
"I don't think anyone knows the answer to that precisely. We know we have to try. And we know these facilities do work. Whether we can build enough of them to preserve the coal industry as we know it today I think is a question," Kammen said.
Kammen told Pelley that there are hundreds of coal-fired plants in the United States, and that each one would need to be outfitted with carbon caption sequestration plants.
"What are we talking about here in terms of infrastructure?" Pelley asked.
"So, we're talking about hundreds of billions, to a trillion dollars or so, and every power plant needs to capture its greenhouse gases," Kammen estimated.
Joe Romm thinks a trillion dollars might be optimistic. Romm ran alternative fuel projects in the Clinton administration.
He says the amount of CO2 we're talking about is mind-boggling. "If the world did this at scale, it would be the equivalent amount of CO2 going into the ground as oil now comes out of the ground. So you have to recreate the entire oil delivery infrastructure of the planet, which was built up over a century, just to deal with this CO2," he explained.
Asked if it is practical, Romm told Pelley, "That we don't know yet. No one has ever taken large volumes of CO2 and stuck it in these deep, underground aquifers and then measured and verified that it stays there permanently. I mean, after all if it doesn't stay there permanently, if it leaks out slowly, it's not saving the climate. Remember we've spent 30 years just trying to get one repository for nuclear waste, Yucca Mountain, and we haven't succeeded. Now we're going to need dozens and dozens of repositories for CO2.
"It is not impossible," Duke Energy CEO Jim Rogers argued. "What we need in this country is what I would call a Marshall Plan. We rebuilt the economies of Japan and Germany after World War II. We need to rebuild our economy and transition it to a low carbon economy. We can do that. But it's gonna take trillions of dollars to do it."
Trouble is, there is a Marshall plan today, and it's rebuilding Wall Street. Add to that Congress projection of record federal deficits of a trillion dollars. And it turns out not even the industry that warns of the end of our way of life is paying for it.
Asked how much Duke Energy has invested in carbon sequestration technology so far," Rogers said, "We have not invested any dollars in the technology, per say. We have spent a lot of time and money reviewing and analyzing the various technologies."
"But come on, you admit to being the third largest carbon producer in the United States. You tell me that carbon sequestration is the future, because we can't afford to live without coal. But then you tell me you haven't invested any money in carbon sequestration," Pelley remarked.
"While we haven't spent the money on sequestration technology we spent the time and the energy and we're going to co-invest with the government when this technology evolves," Rogers explained.
If capturing carbon in the U.S. is decades away, consider that China and India now put more carbon in the air than we do and the Chinese are opening coal-fired plants at a rate of one a week. None captures its carbon. Rogers has broken ground on his two new coal-fired plants despite warnings from scientists, like NASA’s Jim Hansen.
"So when Jim Hansen says that to save the planet, we should stop building coal-fired power plants today you say what?" Pelley asked Rogers.
"I say, 'Mr. Hansen, can't get done, won't get done,'" Rogers replied. "We've got to keep our economy going. We've got to make the transition. And I'm gonna do everything I can with the greatest sense of urgency to make the transition. But to do what you ask me to do now is just not doable."
President Obama wants to speed up cleaner technologies by taxing utilities for the carbon they produce. But the idea is meeting some stiff resistance in Congress.
 Bob DeMarco is a citizen journalist and twenty year Wall Street veteran. Bob has written more than 500 articles with more than 11,000 links to his work on the Internet. Content from All American Investor has been syndicated on Reuters, the Wall Street Journal, Fox News, Pluck, Blog Critics, and a growing list of newspaper websites. Bob is actively seeking syndication and writing assignments. |
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Sunday, April 19, 2009
60 Minutes Cold Fusion (Video and Text)
Could be some serious investment opportunities here. Including but not limited to palladium.
Twenty years ago it appeared, for a moment, that all our energy problems could be solved. It was the announcement of cold fusion - nuclear energy like that which powers the sun - but at room temperature on a table top. It promised to be cheap, limitless and clean. Cold fusion would end our dependence on the Middle East and stop those greenhouse gases blamed for global warming. It would change everything.
But then, just as quickly as it was announced, it was discredited. So thoroughly, that cold fusion became a catch phrase for junk science. Well, a funny thing happened on the way to oblivion - for many scientists today, cold fusion is hot again.
"We can yield the power of nuclear physics on a tabletop. The potential is unlimited. That is the most powerful energy source known to man," researcher Michael McKubre told 60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley.
McKubre says he has seen that energy more than 50 times in cold fusion experiments he's doing at SRI International, a respected California lab that does extensive work for the government.
McKubre is an electro-chemist who imagines, in 20 years, the creation of a clean nuclear battery. "For example, a laptop would come pre-charged with all of the energy that you would ever intend to use. You're now decoupled from your charger and the wall socket," he explained.
The same would go for cars. "The potential is for an energy source that would run your car for three, four years, for example. And you'd take it in for service every four years and they'd give you a new power supply," McKubre told Pelley.
"Power stations?" Pelley asked.
"You can imagine a one for one plug in replacement for nuclear fuel rods. And the difference only would be that at the end of the lifetime of that fuel rod, you didn't have radioactive waste that needed to be disposed of," McKubre replied.
He showed 60 Minutes just how simple the experiment looks; there are only three main ingredients. First, there is palladium, a metal in the platinum family. Second, one needs a kind of hydrogen called deuterium which is found in seawater.
"Deuterium is essentially unlimited. There is ten times as much energy in a gallon of sea water, from the deuterium contained within it, than there is in a gallon of gasoline," he explained.
The palladium is placed in water containing deuterium and the third ingredient is an electric current.
The experiment is wrapped in insulation and instruments. They're looking for what they call "excess heat." In other words, is more energy coming out than the electric current puts in?
No one knows exactly how excess heat would be generated, but McKubre showed 60 Minutes what he thinks is happening.
At the atomic level, palladium looks like a lattice and the electricity drives the deuterium to the palladium. "They sit on the surface and they pop inside the lattice," he explained, using an artist's rendition of the lattice.
McKubre believes there is a nuclear reaction - possibly a fusion process like what happens in the sun, but occurring inside the metal, at a slower rate, and without dangerous radiation.
Scientists today like to call it a nuclear effect rather than cold fusion. At least 20 labs working independently have published reports of excess heat - heat up to 25 times greater than the electricity going in.
"This little piece of palladium metal has about a third as much energy as the battery in your automobile. So very small volumes, very small masses can produce large amounts of energy," he explained, holding a small piece of palladium foil weighing just 0.3 grams.
McKubre has been working on this since that first discredited claim of cold fusion made headlines 20 years ago.
"To work on this issue is almost to put your scientific credibility at risk and I wonder why you've done it?" Pelley asked.
"My belief is that if there's a one percent chance that Fleischmann and Pons were correct, and I now believe that possibility is 99 percent. I have a duty to work on it," he replied.
Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons amazed the world in 1989 with their cold fusion news conference at the University of Utah. Fleischmann in particular was one of the world's leading electro-chemists, and the announcement of room temperature fusion set the world on fire.
Immediately, prestigious labs at MIT and Caltech rushed to reproduce the experiment, but didn't get the same results as Fleischmann and Pons.
The careers of Fleischmann and Pons were destroyed as quickly as a nuclear flash - names once linked to a Nobel Prize were forgotten by nearly everyone. And most of the scientific world today is happy to leave it that way.
"I'm still waiting for the water heaters. I'm still waiting for the thing that will produce heat on demand," Richard Garwin, one of the most respected physicists in the world, told Pelley.
In the 1950s, he helped design the most successful fusion experiment of all time: the hydrogen bomb.
"It was unfortunately, a very successful experiment," Garwin told Pelley.
Garwin was a critic of Martin Fleischmann back in 1989. And he has seen reports on the research that's been done since.
He thinks McKubre is mistaken.
Asked why, Garwin said, "I think probably he measures the input power wrong."
It's one of the most common criticisms of cold fusion experiments - that the amount of electricity going in and the heat coming out are simply mismeasured.
"It's possible, it is possible, that I have been mismeasuring energy for 20 years, but I think it extremely unlikely. A very large number of people have been making these measurements and measurements of current, voltage, temperature, resistance they're some of the simplest measurements that a physicist or a physical scientist will measure," McKubre said.
But there's another problem that critics point out: the experiments produce excess heat at best 70 percent of the time; it can take days or weeks for the excess heat to show up. And it's never the same amount of energy twice.
"I require that you be able to make one of these things, replicate it, put it here. It heats up the cup of tea. I'll drink the tea. Then you make me another cup of tea. And I'll drink that too. That's not it," Garwin said.
He told Pelley that for him to become a believer, the process would have to work 100 percent of the time.
But McKubre said, "Our critics often complain that we can't boil water to make tea. We could have, in fact, boiled 64 gallons of water and made 1,000 cups of tea, had we chosen to do so."
No one's sure why the experiments can't be consistently reproduced. McKubre thinks it has something to do with how the palladium is prepared. He's working with an Italian government lab called ENEA where some of the most reliable palladium is made.
With so many open questions, 60 Minutes wanted to find out whether cold fusion is more than a tempest in a teapot. So 60 Minutes asked the American Physical Society, the top physics organization in America, to recommend an independent scientist. They gave us Rob Duncan, vice chancellor of research at the University of Missouri and an expert in measuring energy.
"When we first called you and said 'We'd like you to look into cold fusion for 60 Minutes,' what did you think when you hung up the phone?" Pelley asked Duncan.
"I think my first reaction was something like, 'Well, hasn't that been debunked?'" he replied.
We asked Duncan to go with 60 Minutes to Israel, where a lab called Energetics Technologies has reported some of the biggest energy gains yet.
Duncan spent two days examining cold fusion experiments and investigating whether the measurements were accurate.
Asked what he thought when he left the Israeli lab, Duncan told Pelley, "I thought, 'Wow. They've done something very interesting here.'"
He crunched the numbers himself and searched for an explanation other than a nuclear effect. "I found that the work done was carefully done, and that the excess heat, as I see it now, is quite real," Duncan said.
Asked if was surprised that he'd hear himself saying that, Duncan told Pelley, "Very much. I never thought I'd say that."
And we've found that the Pentagon is saying it to. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, known as DARPA, did its own analysis and 60 Minutes obtained an internal memo that concludes there is "no doubt that anomalous excess heat is produced in these experiments."
Asked if he feels vindicated after all these years, McKubre told Pelley with a smile, "I don't have any real need for vindication. I know what I've seen."
"That was a pretty big smile on your face though," Pelley pointed out.
"It's good. It's not bad. Certainly it’s good," McKubre replied.
Now the Pentagon is funding more experiments at the naval research lab in Washington, D.C. and at McKubre's lab in California.
60 Minutes wondered what Richard Garwin would think of the Defense Department's appraisal.
"The experiments leave 'no doubt that anomalous, excess heat is produced,'" Pelley told Garwin.
"Well, that’s a statement," Garwin said. "I am living proof that there's doubt. Now, they can say that there, that excess heat is being produced. But they can't say there's no doubt. All they can say is they don't doubt. But I doubt."
"If you ask me, is this going to have any impact on our energy policy, it’s impossible to say, because we don't fundamentally understand the process yet. But to say, because we don't fundamentally understand the process and that's why we're not going to study it, is like saying, 'I'm too sick to go to the doctor,'" Duncan argued.
"You know, I wonder how you feel about going public endorsing this phenomenon on 60 Minutes when maybe 90 percent, I'm guessing, of your colleagues think that it's crackpot science?" Pelley asked.
"I certainly was among those 90 percent before I looked at the data. And I can see where they’ll be very concerned when they see this piece. All I have to say is: read the published results. Talk to the scientists. Never let anyone do your thinking for you," he replied.
There was one more scientist 60 Minutes wanted to find, a man who left America in disgrace and retired with his wife to the English countryside.
Martin Fleischmann, the man who announced cold fusion to the world, is hindered by years, diabetes, Parkinson's disease and maybe a little bitterness. At home, he pulled out an improved version of his experiment, something that he was working on when he was hounded out of science.
"When you hold that in your hand and you think back on what's happened these last 20 years, what do you think?" Pelley asked.
"A wasted opportunity," Fleischmann replied.
He thinks this way because it was discredited at the time.
He told Pelley he has two regrets: calling the nuclear effect "fusion," a name coined by a competitor, and having that news conference, something he says the University of Utah wanted.
"Now that you know that your experiments have been replicated and, and improved upon in labs all over the world I wonder, do you see a day when homes will be powered by these cells, when cars will be powered by these cells?" Pelley asked.
"I think so. It wouldn’t take very long to implement this," Fleischman replied, laughing. "You make me feel that I should take a part in this?"
"I'm getting you interested again?" Pelley asked.
"Yes," Fleischmann replied, laughing. "The potential is exciting."
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Twenty years ago it appeared, for a moment, that all our energy problems could be solved. It was the announcement of cold fusion - nuclear energy like that which powers the sun - but at room temperature on a table top. It promised to be cheap, limitless and clean. Cold fusion would end our dependence on the Middle East and stop those greenhouse gases blamed for global warming. It would change everything.
But then, just as quickly as it was announced, it was discredited. So thoroughly, that cold fusion became a catch phrase for junk science. Well, a funny thing happened on the way to oblivion - for many scientists today, cold fusion is hot again.
"We can yield the power of nuclear physics on a tabletop. The potential is unlimited. That is the most powerful energy source known to man," researcher Michael McKubre told 60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley.
McKubre says he has seen that energy more than 50 times in cold fusion experiments he's doing at SRI International, a respected California lab that does extensive work for the government.
McKubre is an electro-chemist who imagines, in 20 years, the creation of a clean nuclear battery. "For example, a laptop would come pre-charged with all of the energy that you would ever intend to use. You're now decoupled from your charger and the wall socket," he explained.
The same would go for cars. "The potential is for an energy source that would run your car for three, four years, for example. And you'd take it in for service every four years and they'd give you a new power supply," McKubre told Pelley.
"Power stations?" Pelley asked.
"You can imagine a one for one plug in replacement for nuclear fuel rods. And the difference only would be that at the end of the lifetime of that fuel rod, you didn't have radioactive waste that needed to be disposed of," McKubre replied.
He showed 60 Minutes just how simple the experiment looks; there are only three main ingredients. First, there is palladium, a metal in the platinum family. Second, one needs a kind of hydrogen called deuterium which is found in seawater.
"Deuterium is essentially unlimited. There is ten times as much energy in a gallon of sea water, from the deuterium contained within it, than there is in a gallon of gasoline," he explained.
The palladium is placed in water containing deuterium and the third ingredient is an electric current.
The experiment is wrapped in insulation and instruments. They're looking for what they call "excess heat." In other words, is more energy coming out than the electric current puts in?
No one knows exactly how excess heat would be generated, but McKubre showed 60 Minutes what he thinks is happening.
At the atomic level, palladium looks like a lattice and the electricity drives the deuterium to the palladium. "They sit on the surface and they pop inside the lattice," he explained, using an artist's rendition of the lattice.
McKubre believes there is a nuclear reaction - possibly a fusion process like what happens in the sun, but occurring inside the metal, at a slower rate, and without dangerous radiation.
Scientists today like to call it a nuclear effect rather than cold fusion. At least 20 labs working independently have published reports of excess heat - heat up to 25 times greater than the electricity going in.
"This little piece of palladium metal has about a third as much energy as the battery in your automobile. So very small volumes, very small masses can produce large amounts of energy," he explained, holding a small piece of palladium foil weighing just 0.3 grams.
McKubre has been working on this since that first discredited claim of cold fusion made headlines 20 years ago.
"To work on this issue is almost to put your scientific credibility at risk and I wonder why you've done it?" Pelley asked.
"My belief is that if there's a one percent chance that Fleischmann and Pons were correct, and I now believe that possibility is 99 percent. I have a duty to work on it," he replied.
Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons amazed the world in 1989 with their cold fusion news conference at the University of Utah. Fleischmann in particular was one of the world's leading electro-chemists, and the announcement of room temperature fusion set the world on fire.
Immediately, prestigious labs at MIT and Caltech rushed to reproduce the experiment, but didn't get the same results as Fleischmann and Pons.
The careers of Fleischmann and Pons were destroyed as quickly as a nuclear flash - names once linked to a Nobel Prize were forgotten by nearly everyone. And most of the scientific world today is happy to leave it that way.
"I'm still waiting for the water heaters. I'm still waiting for the thing that will produce heat on demand," Richard Garwin, one of the most respected physicists in the world, told Pelley.
In the 1950s, he helped design the most successful fusion experiment of all time: the hydrogen bomb.
"It was unfortunately, a very successful experiment," Garwin told Pelley.
Garwin was a critic of Martin Fleischmann back in 1989. And he has seen reports on the research that's been done since.
He thinks McKubre is mistaken.
Asked why, Garwin said, "I think probably he measures the input power wrong."
It's one of the most common criticisms of cold fusion experiments - that the amount of electricity going in and the heat coming out are simply mismeasured.
"It's possible, it is possible, that I have been mismeasuring energy for 20 years, but I think it extremely unlikely. A very large number of people have been making these measurements and measurements of current, voltage, temperature, resistance they're some of the simplest measurements that a physicist or a physical scientist will measure," McKubre said.
But there's another problem that critics point out: the experiments produce excess heat at best 70 percent of the time; it can take days or weeks for the excess heat to show up. And it's never the same amount of energy twice.
"I require that you be able to make one of these things, replicate it, put it here. It heats up the cup of tea. I'll drink the tea. Then you make me another cup of tea. And I'll drink that too. That's not it," Garwin said.
He told Pelley that for him to become a believer, the process would have to work 100 percent of the time.
But McKubre said, "Our critics often complain that we can't boil water to make tea. We could have, in fact, boiled 64 gallons of water and made 1,000 cups of tea, had we chosen to do so."
No one's sure why the experiments can't be consistently reproduced. McKubre thinks it has something to do with how the palladium is prepared. He's working with an Italian government lab called ENEA where some of the most reliable palladium is made.
With so many open questions, 60 Minutes wanted to find out whether cold fusion is more than a tempest in a teapot. So 60 Minutes asked the American Physical Society, the top physics organization in America, to recommend an independent scientist. They gave us Rob Duncan, vice chancellor of research at the University of Missouri and an expert in measuring energy.
"When we first called you and said 'We'd like you to look into cold fusion for 60 Minutes,' what did you think when you hung up the phone?" Pelley asked Duncan.
"I think my first reaction was something like, 'Well, hasn't that been debunked?'" he replied.
We asked Duncan to go with 60 Minutes to Israel, where a lab called Energetics Technologies has reported some of the biggest energy gains yet.
Duncan spent two days examining cold fusion experiments and investigating whether the measurements were accurate.
Asked what he thought when he left the Israeli lab, Duncan told Pelley, "I thought, 'Wow. They've done something very interesting here.'"
He crunched the numbers himself and searched for an explanation other than a nuclear effect. "I found that the work done was carefully done, and that the excess heat, as I see it now, is quite real," Duncan said.
Asked if was surprised that he'd hear himself saying that, Duncan told Pelley, "Very much. I never thought I'd say that."
And we've found that the Pentagon is saying it to. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, known as DARPA, did its own analysis and 60 Minutes obtained an internal memo that concludes there is "no doubt that anomalous excess heat is produced in these experiments."
Asked if he feels vindicated after all these years, McKubre told Pelley with a smile, "I don't have any real need for vindication. I know what I've seen."
"That was a pretty big smile on your face though," Pelley pointed out.
"It's good. It's not bad. Certainly it’s good," McKubre replied.
Now the Pentagon is funding more experiments at the naval research lab in Washington, D.C. and at McKubre's lab in California.
60 Minutes wondered what Richard Garwin would think of the Defense Department's appraisal.
"The experiments leave 'no doubt that anomalous, excess heat is produced,'" Pelley told Garwin.
"Well, that’s a statement," Garwin said. "I am living proof that there's doubt. Now, they can say that there, that excess heat is being produced. But they can't say there's no doubt. All they can say is they don't doubt. But I doubt."
"If you ask me, is this going to have any impact on our energy policy, it’s impossible to say, because we don't fundamentally understand the process yet. But to say, because we don't fundamentally understand the process and that's why we're not going to study it, is like saying, 'I'm too sick to go to the doctor,'" Duncan argued.
"You know, I wonder how you feel about going public endorsing this phenomenon on 60 Minutes when maybe 90 percent, I'm guessing, of your colleagues think that it's crackpot science?" Pelley asked.
"I certainly was among those 90 percent before I looked at the data. And I can see where they’ll be very concerned when they see this piece. All I have to say is: read the published results. Talk to the scientists. Never let anyone do your thinking for you," he replied.
There was one more scientist 60 Minutes wanted to find, a man who left America in disgrace and retired with his wife to the English countryside.
Martin Fleischmann, the man who announced cold fusion to the world, is hindered by years, diabetes, Parkinson's disease and maybe a little bitterness. At home, he pulled out an improved version of his experiment, something that he was working on when he was hounded out of science.
"When you hold that in your hand and you think back on what's happened these last 20 years, what do you think?" Pelley asked.
"A wasted opportunity," Fleischmann replied.
He thinks this way because it was discredited at the time.
He told Pelley he has two regrets: calling the nuclear effect "fusion," a name coined by a competitor, and having that news conference, something he says the University of Utah wanted.
"Now that you know that your experiments have been replicated and, and improved upon in labs all over the world I wonder, do you see a day when homes will be powered by these cells, when cars will be powered by these cells?" Pelley asked.
"I think so. It wouldn’t take very long to implement this," Fleischman replied, laughing. "You make me feel that I should take a part in this?"
"I'm getting you interested again?" Pelley asked.
"Yes," Fleischmann replied, laughing. "The potential is exciting."
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Sunday, March 22, 2009
60 minutes President Barack Obama, Part Two
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Pres. Obama spoke candidly with Steve Kroft about adjusting to life as the nation's 44th president and as the current occupant of the White House with a wife and 2 young daughters.
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Sunday, February 15, 2009
60 minutes World Of Trouble--Housing and Lending Practices Video
This 60 minutes video will make you sick. The kinds of lending practices you will see in this video were common place. There was one single goal--to create fee income and enrich management at the expense of ordinary Americans. Get the unsuspecting customer to refinance into a toxic mortgage like an Option Arm. Charge very high fees. This strategy enriched management at the expense of shareholders who got left holding the bag.
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I have written many times about the housing scam and Options Arms--The Toxic Mortgage
Three years before the housing market crash, Paul Bishop says he warned his superiors at World Savings - the nation's second largest savings and loan company - that many of the mortgages they were granting were misleading and predatory.
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I have written many times about the housing scam and Options Arms--The Toxic Mortgage
- Ray Dalio on the current state of affairs in the market
- Homebuyer Credit Won’t Stabilize Market, Analysts Say
- Roubini Predicts U.S. Losses May Reach $3.6 Trillion
- Six Errors on the Path to the Financial Crisis
- Who Caused the Financial Crisis?
- Option ARM--The Toxic Mortgage
- Debt Binge--The Perfect Financial Storm
60 minutes "Buy American" A Risk?
A clause in the stimulus package calls for a "buy American" clause concerning steel. But as Lesley Stahl reports, some fear that this clause could lead to trade retaliation.
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