PARTICLE PHYSICS

A new particle accelerator aims to unlock secrets of bizarre atomic nuclei

The Facility for Rare Isotope Beams will help physicists learn how elements form in the distant environs of space

When it switches on in early 2022, the Facility for Rare Isotope Beams’ particle accelerator (shown) will accelerate beams of ions to about half the speed of light.

By Emily Conover


Inscribed on an Italian family’s 15th century coat of arms and decorating an ancient Japanese shrine, the Borromean rings are symbolically potent. Remove one ring from the trio of linked circles and the other two fall apart. It’s only when all three are entwined that the structure holds. The rings have represented the concepts of unity, the Christian Holy Trinity and even certain exotic atomic nuclei.

A rare variety, or isotope, of lithium has a nucleus that is made of three conjoined parts. Lithium-11’s nucleus is separated into a main cluster of protons and neutrons flanked by two neutrons, which form a halo around the core. Remove any one piece and the trio disbands, much like the Borromean rings.

Not only that, lithium-11’s nucleus is enormous. With its wide halo, it is the same size as a lead nucleus, despite having nearly 200 fewer protons and neutrons. The discovery of lithium-11’s expansive halo in the mid-1980s shocked scientists (SN: 8/20/88, p. 124), as did its Borromean nature. “There wasn’t a prediction of this,” says nuclear theorist Filomena Nunes of Michigan State University in East Lansing. “This was one of those discoveries that was like, ‘What? What’s going on?’ ”

Remove one of the three Borromean rings and the whole structure falls apart. Some atomic nuclei have the same property.

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Lithium-11 is just one example of what happens when nuclei get weird. Such nuclei, Nunes says, “have properties that are mind-blowing.” They can become distorted into unusual shapes, such as a pear (SN: 6/15/13, p. 14). Or they can be sheathed in a skin of neutrons — like a peel on an inedible nuclear fruit (SN: 6/5/21, p. 5).

A new tool will soon help scientists pluck these peculiar fruits from the atomic vine. Researchers are queuing up to use a particle accelerator at Michigan State to study some of the rarest atomic nuclei. When it opens in early 2022, the Facility for Rare Isotope Beams, or FRIB (pronounced “eff-rib”), will strip electrons off of atoms to make ions, rev them up to high speeds and then send them crashing into a target to make the special nuclei that scientists want to study.

Experiments at FRIB will probe the limits of nuclei, examining how many neutrons can be crammed into a given nucleus, and studying what happens when nuclei stray far from the stable configurations found in everyday matter. With FRIB data, scientists aim to piece together a theory that explains the properties of all nuclei, even the oddballs. Another central target: pinning down the origin story for chemical elements birthed in the extreme environments of space.

And if scientists are lucky, new mind-blowing nuclear enigmas, perhaps even weirder than lithium-11, will emerge. “We’re going to have a new look into an unexplored territory,” says nuclear physicist Brad Sherrill, scientific director of FRIB. “We think we know what we’ll find, but it’s unlikely that things are going to be as we expect.”

Curious halo

Lithium-11’s nucleus has a center packed with protons and neutrons, surrounded by two neutrons in a broad halo. If one of those three components is removed, the nucleus can’t stay bound, what’s known as a Borromean nucleus.

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Exploring instability

Atomic nuclei come in a dizzying number of varieties. Scientists have discovered 118 chemical elements, distinguished by the number of protons in their nuclei (SN: 1/19/19, p. 18). Each of those elements has a variety of isotopes, different versions of the element formed by switching up the number of neutrons inside the nucleus. Scientists have predicted the existence of about 8,000 isotopes of known elements, but only about 3,300 have made an appearance in detectors. Researchers expect FRIB will make a sizable dent in the missing isotopes. It may identify 80 percent of possible isotopes for all the elements up through uranium, including many never seen before.

The most familiar nuclei are those of the roughly 250 isotopes that are stable: They don’t decay to other types of atoms. The ranks of stable isotopes include the nitrogen-14 and oxygen-16 in the air we breathe and the carbon-12 found in all known living things. The number following the element’s name indicates the total number of protons and neutrons in the nucleus.

Stable nuclei have just the right combination of protons and neutrons. Too many or too few neutrons causes a nucleus to decay, sometimes slowly over billions of years, other times in mere fractions of a second (SN: 3/2/19, p. 32). To understand what goes on inside these unstable nuclei, scientists study them before they decay. In general, as the proton-neutron balance gets more and more off-kilter, a nucleus gets further from stability, and its properties tend to get stranger.

Such exotic specimens test the limits of scientists’ theories of the atomic nucleus. While a given theory might correctly explain nuclei that are near stability, it may fail for more unusual nuclei. But physicists want a theory that can explain the most unusual to the most banal.

“We would like to understand how the atomic nucleus is built, how it works,” says theoretical nuclear physicist Witold Nazarewicz, FRIB’s chief scientist.

Accelerating beams of ions in FRIB is like herding cats.

In the beginning, “it’s just a gaggle of cats,” says Thomas Glasmacher, FRIB’s laboratory director. The cats meander this way or that, but if you can nudge the unruly bunch in a particular direction — maybe you open a can of cat food — then the cats start moving together, despite their natural tendency to wander. “Pretty soon, it’s a stream of cats,” he says.

In FRIB’s case, the cats are ions — atoms with some or all of their electrons stripped off. And rather than cat food, electromagnetic forces get them moving en masse.

The journey starts in one of FRIB’s two ion sources, where elements are vaporized and ionized. After some initial acceleration to get the ions moving, the beam enters the linear accelerator, which is what sets the particles really cruising. The linear accelerator looks like a scaled-down freight train — a line of 46 boxes the color of pistachio ice cream, each about 2.5 meters tall, of varying lengths. But the accelerator sends the beam moving much faster than a cargo-filled train — up to about half the speed of light.

Within the green boxes, called cryomodules, superconducting cavities are cooled to just a few kelvins, a smidge above absolute zero. At those temperatures, the cavities can accelerate the ions using rapidly oscillating electromagnetic fields. The chain of pistachio modules wends around the facility in the shape of a paper clip, a contortion necessary so that the approximately 450-meter-long accelerator fits in the 150-meter-long tunnel that houses it.

When the beam is fully accelerated, it’s slammed into a graphite target. That hard hit knocks protons and neutrons off the nuclei of the incoming ions, forming new, rarer isotopes. Then, the specific one that a scientist wants to study is separated from the riffraff by magnets that redirect particles based on their mass and electric charge. The particles of interest are then sent to the experimental area, where scientists can use various detectors to study how the particles decay, measure their properties or determine what reactions they undergo.

Up to speed

FRIB’s accelerator is bent into a paper clip shape to fit the full 450-meter length of the apparatus in the tunnel where it is housed. Forty-six cryomodules (green boxes) contain superconducting cavities that accelerate particles. Once the ions are accelerated, they are slammed into a target to create new isotopes. Farther down the line, magnets separate out the specific isotopes that scientists want to study.

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The energy of FRIB’s beam is carefully selected for producing rare isotopes. Too much energy would blow the nuclei apart when they collide with the target. So FRIB is designed to reach less than a hundredth the energy of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN near Geneva, the world’s most energetic accelerator.

Instead, the new accelerator’s potential rests on its juiced-up intensity: Essentially, it has lots and lots of particles in its beam. For example, FRIB will be able to slam 50 trillion uranium ions per second into its target. As a result, it will produce more intense streams of rare isotopes than its predecessors could.

For isotopes that are relatively easily produced, FRIB will churn out about a trillion per second; plenty to study. That opens prospects for scrutinizing isotopes that are more difficult to make. Those isotopes might pop up once a week in FRIB, but that’s still much more often than in a weaker beam. It’s like a case of low water pressure in the bathroom: “You can’t have a shower if it’s just trickling,” says Nunes, who is one of the leaders of a coalition of theoretical physicists supporting research at FRIB. Now, “FRIB is going to come in with a fire hose.”

The FRIB cryogenic plant makes liquid helium to cool components of FRIB’s accelerator that rely on superconductors, which conduct electricity without resistance at temperatures just above absolute zero. MICHIGAN STATE UNIV.

Dripping with neutrons

That fire hose will also come in handy for pinpointing a crucial boundary known as the neutron drip line.

Try to stuff too many neutrons in a nucleus, and it will decay almost immediately by spitting out a neutron. Imagine a greedy chipmunk with its cheeks so full of nuts that when it tries to shove in one more, another nut pops right back out. The threshold at which nuclei decay in this way marks the ultimate limits for bound nuclei. On a chart of the known elements and their isotopes, this boundary traces out a line, the neutron drip line. So far, scientists know the location of this crucial demarcation up through, at most, the 10th element on the periodic table, neon.

“FRIB is going to be the only way to go heavier and far enough out to define that drip line,” says nuclear physicist Heather Crawford of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California. FRIB is expected to determine the neutron drip line up to the 30th element, zinc, and maybe even farther.

Nuclear limits

Scientists have discovered a slew of isotopes of chemical elements (green). FRIB is expected to find new ones (turquoise) within the full range of predicted isotopes (gold). The neutron drip line, the bottom edge of the colored region, marks the limits of nuclei, but scientists don’t know exactly where it lies.

Landscapes of isotopes

FRIB

Near that drip line, where neutrons greatly outnumber protons, is where nuclei get especially strange. Lithium-11, with its capacious halo, sits right next to the drip line. Crawford focuses on magnesium isotopes that are close to the drip line. The most common stable magnesium isotope has 12 protons and 12 neutrons. Crawford’s main target, magnesium-40, has 12 protons and more than double that number of neutrons — 28 — in its nucleus.

“That’s right out at the limits of existence,” Crawford says. Out there, theories that predict the properties of nuclei are no longer reliable. Theoretical physicists can’t always be sure what size and shape a given nucleus in this realm might be, or even whether it qualifies as a bound nucleus. A given theory might also fall short when predicting how much energy is needed to bump the nucleus into its various energized states. The spacing of these energy levels acts as a kind of fingerprint of an atomic nucleus, one that’s highly sensitive to the details of the nucleus’ shape and other properties.

Sure enough, magnesium-40 behaves unexpectedly, Crawford and colleagues reported in 2019 in Physical Review Letters. While theories predicted its energy levels would match those of magnesium isotopes with slightly fewer neutrons, magnesium-40’s energy levels were significantly lower than its neighbors’.

In August, Crawford learned that she will be one of the first scientists to use FRIB. Two experiments she and colleagues proposed were selected for the first round of about 30 experiments to take place over FRIB’s first two years. She’ll take a closer look at magnesium-40, which, like lithium-11, has a Borromean nucleus. Crawford now aims to determine if her chosen isotope also has a haloed nucleus. That’s one possible explanation for magnesium-40’s oddness. Despite the fact that nuclei with halos have been known for decades, theories still can’t reliably predict which nuclei will be festooned with them. Understanding magnesium-40 could help scientists firm up their accounting of nuclei’s neutron adornments.

Nucleus possibilities

Unstable magnesium-40 has a nucleus packed with many more neutrons (blue) than the more common, stable magnesium-24, although both have the same number of protons (red). Scientists want to know if magnesium-40 has a typical nucleus or one with a large neutron halo.


Magnesium-24


Standard magnesium-40




Magnesium-40 with halo
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Elemental origins

Physicists want to be able to poke around, like mechanics under the hood, to understand the cosmic nuclear reactions that make the universe go. “Nuclear physics is like the engine of a sports car. It’s what happens in the engine that determines how well the car performs,” says nuclear physicist Ani Aprahamian of the University of Notre Dame in Indiana.

The cosmos powered by that engine can be a violent place for nuclei, punctuated with dramatic stellar explosions and extreme conditions, including matter crammed into ultratight quarters by crushing gravity. These environments beget wonders of nuclear physics unlike those normally seen on Earth. FRIB will let scientists get a glimpse at some of those processes.

For example, physicists think that certain neutron-rich environments are the cauldron where many of the universe’s chemical elements are cooked. This cosmic connection allowed nuclear physicist Jolie Cizewski to make good on a childhood dream.

When Cizewski was a little girl, she caught the astronomy bug, she says. “I decided I was going to become an astronomer so I could go into space.” It might seem that she took a left turn from her childhood obsession. She never made it to orbit and she didn’t become an astronomer.

But echoes of that childhood dream now anchor her research. Instead of peering at the stars with a telescope, she’ll soon be using FRIB to reveal secrets of the cosmos.

Cizewski, of Rutgers University in New Brunswick, N.J., is working to unveil details of the cosmic nuclear reactions responsible for the nuclei that surround us. “I’m trying to understand how the elements, in particular those heavier than iron, have been synthesized,” she says.

Many of the elements around us — and in us — formed within stars. As large stars age, they fuse progressively larger atomic nuclei together in their cores, creating elements farther along the periodic table — oxygen, carbon, neon and others. But the process halts at iron. The rest of the elements must be born another way.

A process called the rapid neutron capture process, or r-process, is responsible for many of those other elements found in nature. In the r-process, atomic nuclei quickly soak up neutrons and bulk up to large masses. The neutronfest is interspersed with radioactive decays that form new elements. The sighting of two neutron stars merging in 2017 revealed that such collisions are one place where the r-process occurs (SN: 11/11/17, p. 6). But scientists suspect it might happen in other cosmic locales as well (SN: 6/8/19, p. 10).

Cizewski and colleagues are studying an abbreviated form of the r-process that might thrive in supernovas, which may not have enough oomph for the full r-process. The team has zeroed in on germanium-80, which plays a pivotal role in the weak r-process. Physicists want to know how likely this nucleus is to capture another neutron to become germanium-81. At FRIB, Cizewski will slam a beam of germanium-80 into deuterium, which has one proton and one neutron in its nucleus. Knowing how often germanium-80 captures the neutron will help scientists nail down the neutron-slurping chain of the weak r-process, wherever it might crop up.

Nuclear physics goes extreme in supernovas (computer simulation shown below) and similar environments. New elements and exotic isotopes may be formed in the tumult.

ADAM BURROWS/PRINCETON UNIV., JOE INSLEY AND SILVIO RIZZI/ARGONNE NATIONAL LAB

A Borromean bent

Like the interlinked Borromean rings, different facets of nuclear physics are closely entwined, from mysteries of the cosmos to the inner workings of nuclei. The exotic nuclei that FRIB cooks up could also allow physicists to tap into the very bedrock of physics by testing certain fundamental laws of nature. And there’s a practical side to the facility as well. Scientists could collect some of the isotopes FRIB produces for use in medical procedures, for example.

Physicists are ready for surprises. “Every time we build such a facility, new discoveries come and breakthroughs in science come,” Nazarewicz says. Like the 1980s discovery of lithium-11’s Borromean nucleus, scientists may find something totally unexpected.

Icing on the cake

Along with studying atomic nuclei at extremes and exploring nuclear physics of the stars, scientists hope to use FRIB to make progress in two other key areas.

Harvesting useful nuclei

Scientists plan to collect isotopes produced in FRIB for societal applications. In medicine, for example, certain isotopes, such as terbium-149, can be used for radiation treatment or medical imaging.

When this isotope of the rare earth metal terbium decays, it can emit alpha particles (helium nuclei) that can kill cancer cells. Its half-life of 4.1 hours is in a sweet spot: fast enough to have an effect — it doesn’t take hundreds of years to decay — but not so fast that it’s gone within seconds, before it can do its work.

Testing laws of nature

Scientists plan to check certain physics rules, for example, the idea that matter and antimatter behave as mirror images. Certain hypothetical physics effects could cause particles to flout this rule, and that could help explain why there’s more matter than antimatter in the universe.

Effects that could make matter and antimatter behave differently might also cause electric charge in atoms to separate, with slightly more positive charge on one side of the atom and more negative on the other. In most atoms, this separation may be too tiny to measure. But in radium-225, which has a pear-shaped nucleus, the effect would be stronger, as the nucleus’ asymmetry should enhance the asymmetry of the atom’s charge.

Questions or comments on this article? E-mail us at feedback@sciencenews.org

CITATIONS

F. Nunes. Why are theorists excited about exotic nuclei? Physics Today. Vol. 74, May 2021, p. 34. doi: 10.1063/PT.3.4748.

L. Neufcourt et al. Quantified limits of the nuclear landscape. Physical Review C. Vol. 101, April 2020, p. 044307. doi: 10.1103/PhysRevC.101.044307.

H. L. Crawford et al. First Spectroscopy of the Near Drip-line Nucleus 40Mg. Physical Review Letters. Vol. 122, February 8, 2019, p. 052501. doi: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.122.052501.

A. B. Balantekin et al. Nuclear Theory and Science of the Facility for Rare Isotope Beams. Modern Physics Letters A. Vol. 29, April 10, 2014, p. 1430010. doi: 10.1142/S0217732314300109.

R. Surman et al. Sensitivity studies for the weak r process: neutron capture rates. AIP Advances. Vol. 4, February 26, 2014, p. 041008. doi: 10.1063/1.4867191.

D.F. Geesaman et al. Physics of a Rare Isotope Accelerator. Annual Review of Nuclear and Particle Science. Vol. 56, April 18, 2006, p. 53. doi: 10.1146/annurev.nucl.55.090704.151604.

About Emily Conover
Physics writer Emily Conover has a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Chicago. She is a two-time winner of the D.C. Science Writers’ Association Newsbrief award.

Where does gold come from?—New insights into element synthesis in the universe

by Helmholtz Association of German Research Centres

Neutron-rich material is ejected from the disk, enabling the rapid neutron-capture process

 (r-process). The light blue region is a particularly fast ejection of matter, called a jet, which

 typically originates parallel to the disk's rotation axis. Credit: National Radio Astronomy 

Observatory, USA

How are chemical elements produced in our Universe? Where do heavy elements like gold and uranium come from? Using computer simulations, a research team from the GSI Helmholtzzentrum für Schwerionenforschung in Darmstadt, together with colleagues from Belgium and Japan, shows that the synthesis of heavy elements is typical for certain black holes with orbiting matter accumulations, so-called accretion disks. The predicted abundance of the formed elements provides insight into which heavy elements need to be studied in future laboratories—such as the Facility for Antiproton and Ion Research (FAIR), which is currently under construction—to unravel the origin of heavy elements. The results are published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

All heavy elements on Earth today were formed under extreme conditions in astrophysical environments: inside stars, in stellar explosions, and during the collision of neutron stars. Researchers are intrigued with the question in which of these astrophysical events the appropriate conditions for the formation of the heaviest elements, such as gold or uranium, exist. The spectacular first observation of gravitational waves and electromagnetic radiation originating from a neutron star merger in 2017 suggested that many heavy elements can be produced and released in these cosmic collisions. However, the question remains open as to when and why the material is ejected and whether there may be other scenarios in which heavy elements can be produced.

Promising candidates for heavy element production are black holes orbited by an accretion disk of dense and hot matter. Such a system is formed both after the merger of two massive neutron stars and during a so-called collapsar, the collapse and subsequent explosion of a rotating star. The internal composition of such accretion disks has so far not been well understood, particularly with respect to the conditions under which an excess of neutrons forms. A high number of neutrons is a basic requirement for the synthesis of heavy elements, as it enables the rapid neutron-capture process or r-process. Nearly massless neutrinos play a key role in this process, as they enable conversion between protons and neutrons.

Sectional view through the simulation of an accretion disc. Credit: GSI Helmholtzzentrum

 für Schwerionenforschung GmbH

"In our study, we systematically investigated for the first time the conversion rates of neutrons and protons for a large number of disk configurations by means of elaborate computer simulations, and we found that the disks are very rich in neutrons as long as certain conditions are met," explains Dr. Oliver Just from the Relativistic Astrophysics group of GSI's research division Theory. "The decisive factor is the total mass of the disk. The more massive the disk, the more often neutrons are formed from protons through capture of electrons under emission of neutrinos, and are available for the synthesis of heavy elements by means of the r-process. However, if the mass of the disk is too high, the inverse reaction plays an increased role so that more neutrinos are recaptured by neutrons before they leave the disk. These neutrons are then converted back to protons, which hinders the r-process." As the study shows, the optimal disk mass for prolific production of heavy elements is about 0.01 to 0.1 solar masses. The result provides strong evidence that neutron star mergers producing accretion disks with these exact masses could be the point of origin for a large fraction of the heavy elements. However, whether and how frequently such accretion disks occur in collapsar systems is currently unclear.

In addition to the possible processes of mass ejection, the research group led by Dr. Andreas Bauswein is also investigating the light signals generated by the ejected matter, which will be used to infer the mass and composition of the ejected matter in future observations of colliding neutron stars. An important building block for correctly reading these light signals is accurate knowledge of the masses and other properties of the newly formed elements. "These data are currently insufficient. But with the next generation of accelerators, such as FAIR, it will be possible to measure them with unprecedented accuracy in the future. The well-coordinated interplay of theoretical models, experiments, and astronomical observations will enable us researchers in the coming years to test neutron star mergers as the origin of the r-process elements," predicts Bauswein.Researchers suggest collapsar accretion disks might be source of heaviest elements

More information: O Just et al, Neutrino absorption and other physics dependencies in neutrino-cooled black hole accretion disks, Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (2021). DOI: 10.1093/mnras/stab2861

Journal information: Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society 

Provided by Helmholtz Association of German Research Centres 

Kessler Syndrome and the space debris problem

This feared space-junk cascade called Kessler Syndrome may have already begun.

Artist's illustration of a debris-spawning event in Earth orbit that can cause the Kessler Syndrome. (Image credit: ESA)

By Mike Wall 

The Kessler Syndrome is a phenomenon in which the amount of junk in orbit around Earth reaches a point where it just creates more and more space debris, causing big problems for satellites, astronauts and mission planners.

Consider this scenario: The destruction of a dead spy satellite spawns a swarm of debris in Earth orbit, which wreaks ever-increasing havoc as it zooms around our planet.

The cloud destroys a number of communications satellites, generating more and more debris with every violent collision. It takes out the iconic Hubble Space Telescope and a NASA space shuttle, killing several crewmembers aboard the winged vehicle. It then lines the International Space Station (ISS) up in its crosshairs, destroying the $100 billion orbiting lab with a hail of fast-flying shrapnel.

This dramatic scene is fictional, of course; it's pulled from the award-winning 2013 sci-fi film "Gravity." But many satellite operators, mission planners and exploration advocates worry that it could be a dark window into a future that's all too real, thanks to the Kessler Syndrome.

Read on to learn more about this feared phenomenon, which describes a snowballing cascade of space junk.

Related: The worst space debris events of all time

KESSLER SYNDROME: A SPACE-JUNK VISIONARY'S PREDICTION

The Kessler Syndrome is named after former NASA scientist Donald Kessler, who laid out the basic idea in a seminal 1978 paper.

In that study, titled "Collision Frequency of Artificial Satellites: The Creation of a Debris Belt," Kessler and co-author Burton Cour-Palais noted that the likelihood of satellite collisions increases as more and more spacecraft are lofted to orbit. And each such smashup would have an outsized impact on the orbital environment.

"Satellite collisions would produce orbiting fragments, each of which would increase the probability of further collisions, leading to the growth of a belt of debris around the Earth," the duo wrote. "The debris flux in such an Earth-orbiting belt could exceed the natural meteoroid flux, affecting future spacecraft designs."

The Kessler Syndrome describes, and warns of, a cascade of orbital debris that could potentially hinder humanity's space ambitions and activities down the road. The original paper predicted that satellite collisions would become a source of space junk by the year 2000, if not sooner, unless humanity changed how it lofted payloads to orbit. But a timeline is not essential to the core idea.

"It was never intended to mean that the cascading would occur over a period of time as short as days or months. Nor was it a prediction that the current environment was above some critical threshold," Kessler wrote in a 2009 paper that clarified the definition of the Kessler Syndrome and discussed its implications.

"The 'Kessler Syndrome' was meant to describe the phenomenon that random collisions between objects large enough to catalogue would produce a hazard to spacecraft from small debris that is greater than the natural meteoroid environment," he added. "In addition, because the random collision frequency is non-linear with debris accumulation rates, the phenomenon will eventually become the most important long-term source of debris, unless the accumulation rate of larger, non-operational objects (e.g., non-operational payloads and upper-stage rocket bodies) in Earth orbit were significantly reduced."

And Kessler didn't name this scenario after himself. In that 2009 paper, he explained that "Kessler Syndrome" apparently originated with John Gabbard, a scientist with the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) who kept an unofficial record of big satellite breakups in orbit.

Gabbard used the term when talking to a reporter shortly after the 1978 study came out. The Kessler Syndrome then worked its way into the public consciousness, "becoming part of the storyline in some science fiction, and a three-word summary describing orbital debris issues," Kessler wrote in the 2009 paper.

To give you another idea of how influential the 1978 study was: A year later, NASA established the Orbital Debris Program Office at Johnson Space Center in Houston and made Kessler its head. (Kessler, who was born in 1940, retired from NASA in 1996 with the title of senior scientist for orbital debris research. But he remains active in the debris research community today.)

KESSLER SYNDROME TIPPING POINT: HOW BAD ARE THINGS NOW?

Earth orbit is getting more and more crowded as the years go by.

Humanity has launched about 12,170 satellites since the dawn of the space age in 1957, according to the European Space Agency (ESA), and 7,630 of them remain in orbit today — but only about 4,700 are still operational.

That means there are nearly 3,000 defunct spacecraft zooming around Earth at tremendous speeds, along with other big, dangerous pieces of debris like upper-stage rocket bodies. For example, orbital velocity at 250 miles (400 kilometers) up, the altitude at which the ISS flies, is about 17,100 mph (27,500 kph).

At such speeds, even a tiny shard of debris can do serious damage to a spacecraft — and there are huge numbers of such fragmentary bullets zipping around our planet. ESA estimates that Earth orbit harbors at least 36,500 debris objects that are more than 4 inches (10 centimeters) wide, 1 million between 0.4 inches and 4 inches (1 to 10 cm) across, and a staggering 330 million that are smaller than 0.4 inches (1 cm) but bigger than 0.04 inches (1 millimeter).

These objects pose more than just a hypothetical threat. From 1999 to May 2021, for example, the ISS conducted 29 debris-avoiding maneuvers, including three in 2020 alone, according to NASA officials. And that number continues to grow; the station performed another such move in November 2021, for example.

Many of the smaller pieces of space junk were spawned by the explosion of spent rocket bodies in orbit, but others were more actively emplaced. In January 2007, for instance, China intentionally destroyed one of its defunct weather satellites in a much-criticized test of anti-satellite technology that generated more than 3,000 tracked debris objects and perhaps 32,000 others too small to be detected. The vast majority of that junk remains in orbit today, experts say.

Spacecraft have also collided with each other on orbit. The most famous such incident occurred in February 2009, when Russia's defunct Kosmos 2251 satellite slammed into the operational communications craft Iridium 33, producing nearly 2,000 pieces of debris bigger than a softball.

That 2009 smashup might be evidence that the Kessler Syndrome is already upon us, though a cataclysm of "Gravity" proportions is still a long way off.

"The cascade process can be more accurately thought of as continuous and as already started, where each collision or explosion in orbit slowly results in an increase in the frequency of future collisions," Kessler told Space Safety Magazine in 2012.

WHAT CAN WE DO TO AVOID KESSLER SYNDROME?

The space community is taking the orbital-debris threat increasingly seriously these days, and not just because of the jolts provided by the Chinese ASAT test and the Iridium-Kosmos crash. Multiple satellite "megaconstellations" are in the works, making space traffic management and space-junk mitigation more pressing issues than they've ever been. (Such networks could also transform the night sky for professional and amateur astronomers, a separate but also important issue.)

For instance, SpaceX has already launched more than 1,700 satellites for its Starlink broadband constellation, which could eventually consist of more than 40,000 craft. OneWeb has lofted more than half of the satellites for its planned 648-member constellation, which may also grow beyond that initial number as time goes on.

Amazon aims to assemble its own internet-satellite network, which will consist of more than 3,200 spacecraft. And in November 2021, Bay Area launch startup Astra filed an application with the U.S. Federal Communications Commission for its own 13,600-satellite broadband constellation.

In addition, launch and satellite construction costs continue to fall, allowing more and more people to get satellites up and operate them — including folks with very little experience in the field. This opening of the final frontier is generally a good thing, most experts say, but it further highlights the need for forethought and responsible action when it comes to satellite operation.

In 2019, for example, the Space Safety Coalition (SSC) laid out a set of proposed voluntary guidelines designed to keep the Kessler Syndrome, and space junk in general, at bay over the coming years.

One recommendation is that all satellites operating above 250 miles (400 km) be equipped with propulsion systems allowing them to maneuver away from possible collisions. Drawing the line there makes sense for multiple reasons, according to the SSC: It's the altitude at which the ISS flies, and satellites that circle below this boundary tend to encounter enough atmospheric drag to fall out of orbit relatively soon after their operational lives come to an end.

The SSC also recommends that satellite designers consider building encryption systems into the command systems of their craft, so they'll be harder for chaos-seeking hackers to hijack. And operators who control satellites in low arth orbit should include in their launch contracts a requirement that rocket upper stages be disposed of in the atmosphere shortly after liftoff.

RELATED STORIES:
— Photos: Space debris images & cleanup concepts
— Space Junk: Tracking & removing orbital debris
— Astroscale space junk removal satellite aces 1st orbital test
--Who's going to fix the space junk problem?

--7 wild ways to destroy orbital debris

IBM debuts quantum machine it says no standard computer can match

IBM has announced its largest quantum processor to date, as the company seeks to show it is on track to create a commercially useful quantum computer by the end of 2023.


BY JEREMY KAHN
November 14, 2021 10:01 PM MST

The new quantum hardware, which IBM is calling Eagle, has 127 qubits, which are the information-processing units of a quantum computer. This is a large enough cluster to perform calculations that cannot be made by traditional computers in a reasonable time frame, the company said.

But the company noted it had not yet done a benchmark demonstration to prove that the new processor can perform tasks beyond the grasp of conventional computers, saying only that the new machine is powerful enough that it should be able to do so.

Quantum computers are machines that use phenomena from quantum physics to process information. In a traditional computer, information is represented in a binary form, known as a bit. A bit can be either a zero or one. In a quantum computer, information is represented by a quantum bit, or qubit for short, that can be placed into a quantum state in which it can represent both zero and one at the same time.

Also, in a classical computer, all the bits in a computer chip function independently. In a quantum computer, the qubits are “entangled” with others in the quantum processor, enabling them all to work together to reach a solution. Those two properties give quantum computers, in theory, exponentially more power than a traditional computer.

But to date, quantum computers have been too underpowered—meaning they have too few qubits and those qubits cannot remain in a quantum state long enough—to pose a major challenge to traditional computers. In 2019, Google achieved a milestone called “quantum supremacy” in which it performed a simulation of a quantum physics problem that could not be carried out on a traditional computer. But, as important as that achievement was in the annals of computer science, it did not have any immediate business applications.

Quantum leap

There are two main problems holding back today’s quantum computers: They don’t have enough qubits in most cases to perform calculations that would give them an edge on standard computers. What’s more, those qubits can only remain in a quantum state for very short periods of time (often just a few hundred microseconds). And when the qubits fall out of a quantum state, errors creep into their calculations. These errors need to be corrected, either by using more qubits, or by using software, but exactly how to do so efficiently remains an unsolved problem.

IBM last year unveiled a road map for the emerging technology that would see the company producing a quantum processor with more than 400 qubits by the end of next year and one with at least 1,000 qubits by 2023. A quantum computer of that size ought to be able to perform many useful business applications, the company has said.

The company is one of dozens around the world racing to commercialize quantum technology. Other leading contenders include tech titan Google, industrial giant Honeywell, which recently spun off its quantum computing division into a separate public company, as well as D-Wave Systems, Rigetti Computing, and IonQ. Microsoft also has a quantum computing effort, although it has suffered setbacks

IBM’s Eagle processor has almost two times the number of qubits contained in the company’s previously largest quantum processor, the 65-qubit Hummingbird, which it debuted last year.

Jerry Chow, IBM’s director of quantum hardware system development, said that the company was still working to benchmark the performance of the new Eagle processor. He noted that IBM was not yet ready to say how long the Eagle’s qubits can remain in a quantum state or the degree to which the qubits are entangled.

He also said that IBM was debuting a new metric for measuring quantum performance called circuit layer operations per second, or CLOPS for short. This stat matters because a quantum computer does not produce a single, accurate result for a calculation, as a classical computer does. Instead, the answer can vary each time the calculation is run. As a result, to reach an accurate solution, the same calculation needs to be run through the quantum processor hundreds or even thousands of times, with the distribution of results converging over time on an accurate solution. In other words, if you ran the same calculation 100 times, and 85 times it produced answer A, then A is the accurate solution, even though 15 times the quantum computer spat out answer B.

But Chow said IBM was not yet ready to release a CLOPS figure for the new Eagle processor. “This is again an area where we are in process of measuring,” he told Fortune.

Chow also said that IBM is making progress in increasing the coherence times of its earlier 27-qubit Falcon processor. It said the qubits in this processor could now remain in a quantum state for as long as 300 microseconds, about three times the median rate for most other qubits built using superconducting materials like IBM’s. (Other companies are pursuing different methods to create qubits, such as using lasers to trap ions, or silicon-based processors that employ materials similar to those in standard computer chips.)

The new Eagle processor will be accessible through a cloud-based connection to companies that are part of IBM’s Q Network of early quantum adopters by the end of the year. Most of these companies, which include the likes of Toyota, Wells Fargo, and Delta Air Lines, have been experimenting with quantum computers and running small proof of concept projects, but have not deployed quantum computers in any real business units.

THE AMERICANIZATION OF THE ALBERTA BOURSE
Alberta could become the first province in Canada to offer corporate opportunity waivers as part of new proposed amendment

Author of the article:Ashley Joannou
Publishing date:Nov 15, 2021 

 

Service Alberta Minister Nate Glubish speaks during a provincial COVID-19 update at the Federal Building on March 27, 2020. PHOTO BY IAN KUCERAK /Postmedia, file
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Proposed amendments to Alberta’s Business Corporations Act would make it easier for directors of private corporations to be involved with multiple related businesses and investments at the same time.

Under the proposed amendments, tabled in the legislature on Monday, Alberta would become the first jurisdiction in Canada to allow corporations to create “corporate opportunity waivers” which set out rules for when directors can be involved in multiple related projects.

Service Alberta Minister Nate Glubish said that often when private equity funds make a large investment in a company they will request a seat or two on the board. At the same time, it is not uncommon for members of these funds to be involved in multiple related businesses that they have an expertise in, he said.

Under the status quo, directors would need permission from the original company they invested in before they could take on another project.

“What the concept of a corporate opportunity waiver would do is it would allow for that company who’s raising that capital to say … we can give you a very narrow and well defined waiver that says in what circumstances you could go in and make these other investments,” Glubish said.

Speeding up the process is a way to attract more business and investment to Alberta, Glubish said.

“The key thing for me is to say, well, as a government we want to try and give Alberta companies as many tools as possible to attract as much capital as possible, especially if they’re attracting it from outside of Alberta. If not having access to corporate opportunity waivers puts certain private equity or venture capital funds out of reach for them, then we’d like to give them this tool,” he said.

While Alberta would become the first jurisdiction in Canada to offer these kind of waivers, similar legislation exists in some parts of the United States.

Specific deals about how a waiver could be used in Alberta will be part of regulations that have yet to be written. Glubish said there will be a requirement that the waivers are embedded in a unanimous shareholders agreement or part of a company’s articles of incorporation.

The legislation would also make changes to the role of directors. Currently, directors are required to disclose and abstain from voting where they have a material interest in any contracts or transactions. Under the new legislation, directors would still have to disclose the potential conflict of interest but would still be able to vote if it is decided that their interests are in line with the company’s.

The legislation would also double the timeframe for dissolved corporations to get back into business to 10 years, and make changes to the shareholders’ approval process.

Swimming in sewage: how can we stop UK water firms dumping human waste in our rivers and seas?

Illustration by Paul Reed / Observer Design

Last week, the companies responsible for polluting our waters were once again let off the hook by the government. But the fightback, from swimmers, surfers and environmentalists, is growing


Tim Adams
@TimAdamsWrites
Sun 14 Nov 2021 

LONG READ

While the global leaders were in Glasgow at Cop26 last week, trying to agree forms of words to convince us they were serious about saving the planet, I was peering into a soupy brook that runs through protected wetland on the north Kent coast. In the past few months, the tidal brook at Long Rock beside the Swalecliffe wastewater treatment plant near Whitstable has become a potent symbol of the battle to enforce that most basic of environmental principles: don’t dump raw human sewage into rivers and seas.

I was standing beside the brook with Andy Taylor, a local musician and environmentalist. Most mornings for the past 15 years Taylor has monitored the big skies here for migrating birds that have decided to make a stopover – bramblings and fieldfares this morning – and also the quality of water in the brook. He points out to me the overflow pipes that sometimes feed untreated sewage directly into the stream. “Some days you come down here and it’s fine and you might even see kingfishers or water voles,” he says. “Other times it’s just dead and stinking, this nasty coffee colour.”

Taylor has a file of pictures of eels, a protected species, floating lifeless on the surface of the water. “They have literally swum all the way from the Sargasso Sea to get here,” he says. “But whatever goes in the water on that last 100 yards of their journey, they cannot survive.”

While we talk, we are joined by Jackie Kohler, who is walking her dogs and lives in one of a row of houses beside the brook at the entrance to the Swalecliffe plant. “What happens is when it rains the tanks overflow, the brook overflows and all the sewage starts running down the road, with all sorts in it and collects by our cars,” she says. “The kids have to use this bridge across the brook to get to school so residents have to come out and sweep it clean.”
You look forward to swimming all week and then you come down and find the sea’s full of shit again and you can’t go in

The brook merited a couple of paragraphs in the sentencing remarks of Mr Justice Johnson this July, in what was the most damning indictment of sewage management in this country since the Great Stink of 1858. The judge’s report effectively documented a surreptitious great stink that Southern Water had perpetrated over a six-year period from January 2010 to December 2015. The water company, whose major shareholders were a consortium ofAmerican and Australian banks, pleaded guilty to 51 counts of discharging untreated sewage into controlled coastal waters at 17 separate sites (including most frequently from the overflow pipes immediately offshore at Swalecliffe). “The total period during which untreated sewage was discharged was 61,704 hours, or just over seven years,” the judge noted. “It has been estimated that the total volume of untreated sewage across all of the sites was of 16-21bn litres or the equivalent of 7,400 Olympic-size swimming pools.”
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In fining Southern Water a record sum of £90m for its systematic breaches, the judgment noted that “history shows that fines of hundreds of thousands or low millions of pounds have not had any effect on the defendant’s offending behaviour”.That criminality was emblematic of a nationwide scandal that means only 16% of English waterways are classified in good ecological health, and which places Britain 25th out of 30 EU countries for coastal water quality, with 200,000 outflows of raw sewage into bathing waters from Whitby to Penzance in May to September of this year alone.

Members of the Whitstable Bubbletits and Bluetits swimming club, many of whom are also members of SOS (Save Our Seas). 

Photograph: Sophia Evans/The Observer

The landmark ruling against Southern Water had several consequences. On a national level it focused attention on the ongoing scandal of so-called combined sewer overflows (CSOs) polluting rivers and seas. On a local level it prompted a wave of protest that has proved an object lesson in the capacity of community activism to shape the political agenda.

The start of that was a public meeting in Whitstable in August organised by the MP, Rosie Duffield, in which representatives of Southern Water were invited to address local concerns. Among those who came along to that meeting were five members of the Whitstable branch of the sea swimming group Bluetits. One of the leaders of this group, Sally Burtt-Jones, sitting sheltered from the biting North Sea wind in her beach hut at Tankerton, half a mile along the coast from Swalecliffe, explained to me what happened next.

“We had prepared quite well for the meeting,” Burtt-Jones says. She’s the daughter of an accountant and she’d gone through Southern Water’s investor reports to find a structure that transferred profits between various businesses with a Cayman Island holding company. “Given that they were supposed to be taking care of local drainage and water needs, none of that felt quite right to me.”

There was a widely held belief, supported by the July judgment, that Southern Water had been accepting fines – even the monster £90m fine – as an anticipated cost, rather than addressing the problems that provoked them (the government claims, without showing its working, that the infrastructure work necessary to put an end to CSOs would potentially cost water companies and their bill payers “between £350bn and £600bn”; most observers put the cost closer to a tenth of that higher figure).

Andy Taylor at the Long Rock nature reserve. 

Photograph: Sophia Evans/The Observer
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“Southern Water sent two guys who were adamant they had been brought in to change things,” Burtt-Jones says (one of them, Toby Willison, was until November 2020 chief operating officer of the Environment Agency, which had brought the legal case against the water company). “They were still trying to have a bit of a pity party for their shareholders who hadn’t had any dividends since 2016,” she recalls. “I was like, ‘How dare you? You’ve got £340m in the bank.’ They told me I didn’t understand what I was talking about.”

The Bluetits group left that meeting feeling there was no real commitment or genuine timeline from Southern Water to end CSOs; sitting in the pub they decided to set up a campaign, Save Our Seas, SOS Whitstable. They created a logo and put the notes from the meeting – inevitably headlined “tits against shits” – online. Within a few days, they had 2,000 supporters. That week, there was yet another mechanical failure at the Swalecliffe plant and with sewage being pumped out, the beaches along the coast were shut for four days right in the middle of August.

The media attention helped the SOS group to start a campaign that focused on an amendment to the environment bill in the House of Lords. The amendment, brought by the independent peer, the Duke of Wellington, would hold water companies legally accountable to reduce the amount of sewage they were putting in the sea.

“We were hoping to get maybe nine or 10,000 people to sign a petition,” Burtt-Jones says. “But then I bumped into someone at a party who knew Deborah Meaden and she tweeted it out.” They got further momentum from hooking up with the longstanding pressure group Surfers Against Sewage.

A protest by SOS Whitstable. 

Photograph: Andrew Hastings/@imagedrum

By the time the 9th Duke of Wellington stood up to move his amendment, finding his own (overflowing) Waterloo, he could not resist “referring to a petition which has been circulating in recent days which already has over 90,000 signatures on it calling on the government to support this amendment”. Burtt-Jones shows me the footage of the debate on her phone. When the Green party peer Jenny Jones got up to praise the duke’s PR machine, he denied all responsibility: “Frankly I was as surprised as any of you that so many emails were sent out.”

The Lords supported the amendment, but of course, the following week the government whipped backbenchers to vote it down, despite a great wave of anger partly directed by the SOS Whitstable group that had seen MPs’ inboxes flooded with outrage about that decision.

The symbolism of that whipped vote was stark. The government’s refusal to back the duke’s amendment (on the grounds of the cost of investing in cleaner rivers and seas) exposed the flimsiness not only of their environmental commitment, but also of the loud election promises to rejuvenate Britain’s coastal communities after Brexit: how can you rejuvenate seaside towns when the beaches are closed and people won’t buy shellfish for fear of contamination? Some Tory MPs were affronted by the suggestion that in voting down greater legal powers against water companies they were voting “to dump sewage in the seas”. Their outrage ignored the fact that in the 30 years since privatisation successive governments had effectively encouraged utility companies to structure themselves as offshore debt instruments, beholden to shareholders not regulators. An investigation by the University of Greenwich, published in the Guardian, showed how since privatisation, £57bn had been paid out by water companies in share dividends – just about the precise cost of the criminally overdue infrastructure improvements that would prevent the sewage outflows.

Sally Burtt-Jones. Photograph: Sophia Evans/The Observer

That impression of business as usual was compounded by the fact that in August it was announced that the Australian asset management group Macquarie had bought a controlling stake in Southern Water, promising £2bn to “strengthen a zero-tolerance mindset to pollution”. Those with not very long memories knew, following an in-depth BBC investigation, that in 2006, Macquarie had borrowed more than £2.8bn to finance the purchase of Thames Water (later repaying £2bn of the debt through new loans raised by a company subsidiary in Cayman Islands), effectively transferring the acquisition costs to Thames Water customers. In those 10 years, while Thames Water debt increased from £4bn to £10bn, share dividends averaged £270m per year. In 2015, when Thames announced a massive “super-sewer” investment project to help alleviate sewage outflows, the entire cost of the project was to come from increased customer bills.

One other result of the national spotlight being shone on the Southern Water scandal was that for perhaps the first time since Brexit, here was an issue that cut across political tribes. Few places in this country were as divided about leaving Europe as the towns of the north Kent coast, but the SOS Whitstable campaign drew support from all quarters: trawlermen and surf schools and Airbnb owners; politicians of both right and left; remainers and Brexiters. Across all of those voters there is a growing campaign to withhold payment of Southern Water bills until action is taken.
It’s shameful the government allows Southern Water to make large profits at the expense of companies like oursJames Green, Whitstable Oyster Company
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At the sharpest end of that protest was the Whitstable Oyster Company, which in the past 30 years has become synonymous with the growth of the town as a tourist and foodie destination. The modern business (which originally dates back to the 1400s) was established by Barrie Green in 1978. It is now run by his sons: Richard, who looks after the restaurants, and James, who manages the oyster farming. I spoke to James in their Lobster Shack restaurant on the seafront last week. “I used to say things couldn’t get any worse,” he told me, still just about retaining a smile, “but I stopped saying that a while ago. Covid we sort of dealt with, though the furlough scheme didn’t help us because we still had to work on the farm. We were building up a stock of oysters, and the plan was to sell those to France as a bulk commodity. But that didn’t happen, because in March, because of Brexit, that market was completely shut to us – despite the fact that Defra had assured us for three years that there would be a clause in the agreement that protected our trade. That was 50% of our business gone overnight.”

Green looked in desperation for other markets. They started selling to Hong Kong and were doing OK up until the end of June. “Then,” he says, “we had a couple of cases of people who had eaten oysters coming down with norovirus, which is highly unusual in the summer.” With the details of the prosecution against Southern Water in the news, Public Health England connected the two and shut down the oyster farm for a month initially at end of June, while Green put “new testing procedures in place including pre-harvesting assessments”.

“We couldn’t sell anything in July and August. We went from maybe £100,000 sales of oysters in June to nothing at all.”

James Green, director of the Whitstable Oyster Fishery Company. 

Photograph: Sophia Evans/The Observer

Green realises that talking about these issues is something of “a double-edged sword” for his business. “The fact is our oysters are safer now than they have ever been because we do so much testing and risk assessment,” he says. “But we have to build confidence again.” In Mr Johnson’s remarks he noted that the Whitstable Oyster Company should think about bringing a civil case against Southern Water. “We would need a class action to do that,” Green says. “You are taking on a $3bn company. They are not going to just roll over and give me £250,000 for loss of earnings – plus x for reputational damage – without a big fight.”

It was the early warning system of oyster testing that first alerted the Environment Agency to the scale of the problems with Southern Water. The trigger was data from the Centre for Environment Fisheries and Aquaculture Science, which monitors the shellfish beds, whose classifications at Whitstable were declining. A similar picture was noted in the Solent, also part of Southern Water’s geography. That prompted the national enforcement service to bring a comprehensive case against a water company for the first time in its history.

Owen Bolton, the Environment Agency’s senior crime officer, led that investigation. He explained to me on the phone the scale of the operation that was required, involving a team of 80, including 15 or 20 investigators in the field. “We collected 2 million lines of flow data,” he says. “And we also went into every Southern Water site to get site diaries, documents about incidents kept by the operator to hand over to the next shift, involving 27,000 entries.” At every stage, the judge noted, Southern Water attempted to obstruct this disclosure process.

Alan Cansdale, the Environment Agency’s area manager, suggests that it was never straightforward for investigators on the ground to build a case. “Sometimes, as with the unfortunate events [when Prince Charles visited Whitstable] for the Queen’s diamond jubilee weekend and there was a massive pollution incident with sewage debris all over the beaches, the issue is very obvious,” he says. “But mostly you are looking for very subtle environmental indicators.” In the end, he says, the investigation against Southern Water began with a very experienced investigator standing with him on a beach suggesting, “something here doesn’t feel right at all”.

One positive result of the July prosecution and fine is that Southern Water now reports CSOs from sites like Swalecliffe on an app almost in real time. The downside of that transparency is that it reveals just how often the discharges – which are supposed to be exceptional, storm-related events – take place.

SOS Whitstable. 

Photograph: Andrew Hastings/@imagedrum

“We could cope if it was two or three times a year,” James Green says, “but we have had months when there have been eight or nine CSOs. Each time, we don’t harvest oysters for a couple of days afterwards, and then we make a risk assessment based on tides and weather conditions and then we test every single batch for E coli and norovirus until they are clean… It is shameful in my view that the government allows Southern Water to make large profits essentially at the expense of sustainable British companies like ours.”

In its defence, Southern Water argues that the pressures on sites such as Swalecliffe, built in the 1960s when the population it served was less than half of the current 40,000, have increased, exacerbated by climate change. Owen Bolton suggests that during their investigation Southern Water was seen to “be investing many millions of pounds in improvements – though many of the infrastructure problems are not things the water companies can solve in six months”.

Officials from the Environment Agency noted after the July verdict that the monitoring system can only work if there is a degree of trust in the operators: “We can’t be sat on every outflow, we can’t be monitoring every pipe.”

In the absence of that trust, the system increasingly depends on community activists to hold the water monopolies to account. Rob Yates, a Labour councillor in nearby Thanet, is also a keen wild swimmer (“I have swum from Alcatraz to San Francisco bay in a pair of Speedos,” he told me). Increasingly, however, he thinks of himself as “a citizen journalist”. Since he moved to Margate he has been swimming in a tidal pool near to one of Southern Water’s pumping stations. “I’ve seen panty liners and stuff in there a day or two after a release,” he says. In recent months Yates has been doing painstaking work, using Freedom of Information requests to try to see exactly how often the water company breaches the terms of its permit.

“The Environment Agency have had their funding cut by two-thirds since 2010,” he says. “They’re obviously going to focus on the big incidents, but if ordinary citizens started doing FoI requests you can begin to find out how many non-compliant incidents there have been and build a picture.”

One of the consequences of that monitoring is that Yates is among the first to see the EA’s testing results. On the day we speak he has seen a reading for E coli that is “very, very high”. “Now the problem for me is, I know that test was done probably five days ago, and it’s taken three days to get test results. So how do I know whether the water is safe now?”

The morning after I met Sally Burtt-Jones, the wind had stopped blowing quite so fiercely and perhaps 40 of the Whitstable Bluetits had gathered on the shingle in the weak morning sunshine outside Tankerton’s Marine Hotel, stripping down to swimming costumes (and bobble hats and gloves) to plunge into the frigid tidal waters. You might think of them as a small army of very British Erin Brockoviches, increasingly expert in the nuances of sewer management and corporate responsibility.
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They include Dodda John-Baptist, 58, a recently retired headteacher, who moved down to Whitstable last year specifically so she could swim every day to ease her osteoarthritis. And Catherine Chapman and Jayne McClelland, who set the group up after the first lockdown as a way of rebuilding community. Watching the Bluetits plunge screaming into the sea, it’s impossible not to admire their collective will; afterwards, shivering on the shingle, several tell me that if it wasn’t for the group spirit they would not have had the courage either to swim or to stand up and be counted in the battle for cleaner seas and rivers.

While she gets dried I chat to Jane Dean, a retired police officer who has come down from Faversham. “I’ve never taken drugs and I don’t drink,” she says “but I can’t imagine the elation you get from any of that matches this. It lasts for hours after you come out. My friend said, ‘I bet people walk past and think: look at all those funny fat old ladies in the sea’. Actually, I said, they are thinking: ‘I wish I had the balls to do that.’”

Jayne McClelland and Jane Dean of the Bluetits swimming club. 

Photograph: Sophia Evans/The Observer

Dean turned 60 was last week. She got her pension on Monday and spent the lump sum on Tuesday, buying a motorhome in which she and her swimming pal plan to tour the coast around to Devon, “tits on tour”, sewage permitting. “Sometimes swimming is the thing you look forward to all week,” she says, “and then you come down here and find the sea’s full of shit again and you can’t go in and your heart just sinks. These days it seems to happen every time it rains…”

We turn to the £90m question of how you make monopoly water operators invest in infrastructure. The consensus is that the directors of these companies need to be held to account in some way for the environmental crimes that occur on their watch. (Southern Water’s CEO during the period for which it was prosecuted, Matthew Wright, announced himself “as shocked as anyone” by the judge’s findings. He left his £700,000 a year job in 2017 and became UK managing director of the £3bn Danish energy firm Ørsted.)

I asked Anne Brosnan, the chief prosecutor for the EA in the Southern Water case, if the agency had considered bringing charges against directors as well as the company itself?

“Yes,” she said. “We have prosecuted individual directors in the past and we will do so in the future. We are now looking at that possibility more closely than ever. But we obviously always have to follow the evidence.”

The Guardian view on sewage: ministers must insist on a clean-up


Last Monday, as MPs were finally voting not to include the duke’s amendment in their environment bill, Southern Water invited a group of local residents – including Sally Burtt-Jones, Andy Taylor and Jackie Kohler – to tour its Swalecliffe site and hear about improvements that were planned. While they were being shown pristine overflow tanks and being told that the pipes into the brook would be capped in the next fortnight, MPs were announcing their partial U-turn on the duke’s amendment, which proposed “a duty of progressive reduction” on sewage dumping. Among those criticising the diluted legislation was former Liberal Democrat leader Tim Farron. “There are no targets in terms of volume or in terms of timescale, which leaves water companies with the power to continue what they do now.”

In the course of her tour at Swalecliffe, Burtt-Jones asked the Southern Water representative if at the very least the company would agree to pay for technology that could monitor sea water safety in real time. “The bloke behaved as if that idea had never occurred to him,” she says. There is no doubt a hope from the government that the stink surrounding this issue will fade. I wouldn’t be so sure. Having finally found an issue on which all of the country can agree, groups such as the Whitstable Bluetits – not to mention the hundreds of thousands of people who support Surfers Against Sewage and other local protests forming up and down the country – are not going anywhere. “The thing is,” Burtt-Jones says, “this is such a simple issue for anyone to understand. Even very small children get it: when they go to the beach, they don’t want to find that the sea is full of poo

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