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DU has violated radioactive waste rules: Centre

May 7, 2010 By vani Leave a Comment

New Delhi, May 7 (ANI): The Union Government on Friday said that Delhi University had violated rules by selling scrap containing radioactive material.

Making a statement in the Lok Sabha, Union Minister of State for Science and Technology Prithviraj Chavan assured members that those responsible for the violation would not be spared.

“Mistake was made by the University in not adhering to rules and its own undertaking to atomic energy authorities that the device, which was used by its Chemistry Department, would not be re-sold,” Chavan said.

He said the DU authorities did not follow rules and asserted that responsibility will be fixed.

“No guilty person will be spared, I assure you,” Chavan said.

He asserted that all the 19 nuclear plants generating electricity in the country were completely safe and mechanisms would be strengthened in the field of atomic research and medical use as “some lessons have been learnt” from the accident in which one person died.

Chavan informed the House that the Delhi Police had upgraded the FIR in the case after one person died.

The Delhi Police is investigation at “criminal negligence” part in the radiation caused by Cobalt-60.

Chavan argued the need to put in place a law on fixing compensation in the case of accidents involving radioactive leakages as there was a “void”.

Asserting that the radiation incident “has nothing to do” with any of the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) facilities or activities, he said the Atomic Energy Regulatory Board (AERB) had a complete inventory of all radioactive sources in the country.

There were 10,000 sources with about 3,000 institutions and licenses were given to users which were “very responsible,” Chavan said.

He said the incident was caused by “unauthorised disposal” of the Gamma Cell by Delhi University as scrap in violation of the Atomic Energy Safe Disposal of Radioactive Waste Rules and the Atomic Energy (Radiation Protection) Rules. (ANI)

Filed Under: International News Tagged With: Atomic Energy Regulatory Board, Atomic Research, chemistry department, Cobalt 60, Criminal Negligence, Delhi Police, delhi university, Disposal Of Radioactive Waste, Energy Authorities, energy radiation, Generating Electricity, Guilty Person, Leakages, lok sabha, nuclear plants, prithviraj, Radiation Incident, radiation protection, Radioactive Sources, Union Government

Invading black holes cause ‘cosmic flashes’

September 19, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

Washington, September 19 (ANI): Mathematicians at the University of Leeds, UK, have determined that cosmic flashes, known as gamma ray bursts, are produced by jets of plasma that originate from invading black holes.

Gamma ray bursts are beams of high-energy radiation that are similar to the radiation emitted by explosions of nuclear weapons.

The orthodox model for this cosmic jet engine involves plasma being heated by neutrinos in a disk of matter that forms around a black hole, which is created when a star collapses.

But, mathematicians at the University of Leeds, have come up with a different explanation: the jets come directly from black holes, which can dive into nearby massive stars and devour them.

Their theory is based on recent observations by the Swift satellite, which indicates that the central jet engine operates for up to 10,000 seconds – much longer than the neutrino model can explain.

Mathematicians believe that this is evidence for an electromagnetic origin of the jets, that is, that the jets come directly from a rotating black hole, and that it is the magnetic stresses caused by the rotation that focus and accelerate the jet’s flow.

For the mechanism to operate, the collapsing star has to be rotating extremely rapidly.

This increases the duration of the star’s collapse as the gravity is opposed by strong centrifugal forces.

One particularly peculiar way of creating the right conditions involves not a collapsing star, but a star invaded by its black hole companion in a binary system.

The black hole acts like a parasite, diving into the normal star, spinning it with gravitational forces on its way to the star’s centre, and finally eating it from the inside.

“The neutrino model cannot explain very long gamma ray bursts and the Swift observations, as the rate at which the black hole swallows the star becomes rather low quite quickly, rendering the neutrino mechanism inefficient, but the magnetic mechanism can,” said Professor Komissarov from the School of Mathematics at the University of Leeds.

“Our knowledge of the amount of the matter that collects around the black hole and the rotation speed of the star allow us to calculate how long these long flashes will be – and the results correlate very well with observations from satellites,” he added. (ANI)

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Radiation therapy ‘highly effective’ against early lung cancer

April 6, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

Washington, Apr 6 (ANI): A high-tech type of radiation treatment called stereotactic body radiation therapy (SBRT) has been found to be “highly effective” in treating early-stage lung cancer for patients who are not eligible for surgery.

This therapy uses very large doses of high-energy radiation (x-rays), which are aimed directly at tumours with great precision and accuracy, thus sparing the surrounding, healthy tissue from damage.

“I think of this as ‘lung-sparing’ treatment, in which many patients with early-stage lung cancer can have effective treatment in as few as three treatment sessions with a low risk of side effects,” said Dr. Ronald McGarry, clinical associate professor and vice chairman of radiation medicine at the UK College of Medicine.

“The data we are reporting now show that long-term control of these localized cancers is possible,” he added.

During the study, the researchers looked at 70 medically inoperable patients at Indiana University.

The patients, most of whom had other significant health problems, median survival was 32.4 months, which compares favourably to the established median survival of only about nine months for untreated early-stage lung cancer.

Nearly 90 percent of patients had no evidence their cancer returned in the lung.

“Lung cancer is our number one cancer killer and non-invasive treatment for those patients with severe heart and lung disease opens new opportunities to help them,” said McGarry.

The study appears in The International Journal of Radiation Oncology, Biology, Physics. (ANI)

Filed Under: Health News Tagged With: body radiation, cancer killer, clinical associate professor, college of medicine, Dr Ronald, energy radiation, international journal of radiation oncology biology physics, invasive treatment, lung cancer, Lung Disease, mcgarry, median survival, precision and accuracy, radiation medicine, radiation oncology, Radiation Physics, radiation therapy, Radiation Treatment, significant health, treatment sessions, tumours, x rays

Gamma-ray burst may have caused mass extinction 440 million years ago

April 5, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

Washington, April 4 (ANI): A new study has suggested that a brilliant burst of gamma rays may have caused a mass extinction event on Earth 440 million years ago, and a similar celestial catastrophe could happen again in the future.

Most gamma-ray bursts are thought to be streams of high-energy radiation produced when the core of a very massive star collapses.
According to a report in National Geographic News, the new computer model shows that a gamma-ray burst aimed at Earth could deplete the ozone layer, cause acid rain, and initiate a round of global cooling from as far as 6,500 light-years away.

Such a disaster may have been responsible for the mass die-off of 70 percent of the marine creatures that thrived during the Ordovician period (488 to 443 million years ago), suggests study leader Brian Thomas, an astrophysicist at Washburn University in Kansas.

The simulation also shows that a significant gamma-ray burst is likely to go off within range of Earth every billion years or so, although the stream of radiation would have to be lined up just right to affect the planet.

Currently WR104, a massive star 8,000 light-years away in the constellation Sagittarius, is in position to be a potential threat, according to Thomas.

Study author Thomas’ former graduate advisor, Adrian Melott, first proposed in 2004 that a gamma-ray burst near Earth wiped out Ordovician life.

Since then, both researchers have been tackling pieces of the puzzle.

According to their newest models, gamma radiation from a nearby burst would quickly deplete much of Earth’s protective ozone layer, allowing increased ultraviolet radiation (UV) from the sun to reach the surface.

In the longer term, chemical reactions in the atmosphere would produce dark, nitrogen-based gases that would block the sun’s heat and trigger global cooling, even as the gamma rays continued to deplete ozone and let in UV rays, the authors suggesedt.

Some of the pollution would fall as damaging acid rain, which can severely disrupt ecosystems.

The atmosphere might be able to recover within a decade, and a rise in DNA damage caused by increased UV exposure might pass after a few months or years, the researchers note.

“But other biological impacts-such as reduced ocean productivity-could linger for an unknown length of time,” Thomas said. (ANI)

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Scientists find oldest isolated pulsar ever

February 27, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

Washington, Feb 27 (ANI): With the help of NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, scientists have found the oldest isolated pulsar ever detected in X-rays.

The pulsar, PSR J0108-1431 (J0108 for short), which is about 200 million years old, turns out to be surprisingly active.

Among isolated pulsars, ones that have not been spun-up in a binary system, it is over 10 times older than the previous record holder with an X-ray detection.

At a distance of 770 light years, it is one of the nearest pulsars known.

Pulsars are born when stars that are much more massive than the Sun collapse in supernova explosions, leaving behind a small, incredibly weighty core, known as a neutron star.

At birth, these neutron stars, which contain the densest material known in the Universe, are spinning rapidly, up to a hundred revolutions per second.

As the rotating beams of their radiation are seen as pulses by distant observers, similar to a lighthouse beam, astronomers call them “pulsars”.

Astronomers observe a gradual slowing of the rotation of the pulsars as they radiate energy away.

Radio observations of J0108 show it to be one of the oldest and faintest pulsars known, spinning only slightly faster than one revolution per second.

The surprise came when a team of astronomers led by George Pavlov of Penn State University observed J0108 in X-rays with Chandra.

They found that it glows much brighter in X-rays than was expected for a pulsar of such advanced years.

Some of the energy that J0108 is losing as it spins more slowly is converted into X-ray radiation. The efficiency of this process for J0108 is found to be higher than for any other known pulsar.

“This pulsar is pumping out high-energy radiation much more efficiently than its younger cousins,” said Pavlov. “So, although it’s clearly fading as it ages, it is still more than holding its own with the younger generations,” he added.

At its advanced age, J0108 is close to the so-called “pulsar death line,” where its pulsed radiation is expected to switch off and it will become much harder, if not impossible, to observe.

“We can now explore the properties of this pulsar in a regime where no other pulsar has been detected outside the radio range,” said co-author Oleg Kargaltsev of the University of Florida.

“To understand the properties of ‘dying pulsars,’ it is important to study their radiation in X-rays. Our finding that a very old pulsar can be such an efficient X-ray emitter gives us hope to discover new nearby pulsars of this class via their X-ray emission,” he added. (ANI)

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: binary system, chandra x ray, collapse, death line, energy radiation, george pavlov, glows, light-years, lighthouse beam, NASA, neutron star, neutron stars, penn state university, pulsar psr, radio observations, ray observatory, ray radiation, s chandra, supernova explosions, x rays

DU has violated radioactive waste rules: Centre

Invading black holes cause ‘cosmic flashes’

Radiation therapy ‘highly effective’ against early lung cancer

Gamma-ray burst may have caused mass extinction 440 million years ago

Scientists find oldest isolated pulsar ever

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