Robyn Williams: Meet Professor Gerry Thomas.

Gerry Thomas: Actually, if you live near a coal-fired power station, it emits three times as much radiation as a nuclear power station in normal operation. Quite difficult to take in, but that's what the science tells us.

Robyn Williams: And so to Chernobyl.

[Excerpt from BHO’s Chernobyl]

This is The Science Show.

[Excerpt from HBO’s Chernobyl]

From the series Chernobyl. See it and quake. But it is yet another example, like climate denial, of authorities refusing to acknowledge nature and physics. And here in Australia, as you know, we have an enquiry into the future of nuclear as an option going on in a world facing climate crisis. Gerry Thomas is Professor of Molecular Pathology at Imperial College in London.

My first question; have you seen the series Chernobyl?

Gerry Thomas: I've only seen the first episode I'm afraid, I haven't seen the whole series yet.

Robyn Williams: And what did you think of it so far?

Gerry Thomas: I afraid it took me three hours to watch because I kept stopping it and writing down all the inaccuracies.

Robyn Williams: That many inaccuracies do you think?

Gerry Thomas: Yes, there were lots of nuances about what radiation might be doing which actually weren't correct, and other things like opening a door with a fire behind it with your bare hand and your bare hand not suffering the consequences. So there were lots of little things like that that I picked up in the first one, and unfortunately I haven't had time to go back and watch the rest of it.

Robyn Williams: Well, it's going to take you practically a week to go through the rest.

Gerry Thomas: It probably will but hopefully I'll get less sensitised as I go through.

Robyn Williams: Well, the first question about Chernobyl really is the discrepancy between the number of deaths, which some people say is 57 deaths, and the thousands from other sources. What is your opinion?

Gerry Thomas: Well, if I quote from the UNSCEAR documentation, which is the stuff that we've gone through and looked at everything we could possibly do, looked at all the scientific evidence, there are about 134 people who had acute radiation syndrome, and those are the people who had the really high doses. We know 28 of those died within a few weeks to months after the accident. There are many of that cohort still alive, some of them have subsequently died as the cohort ages. Obviously these were people sometimes in middle age, so you would expect some of them to die anyway from natural causes. Some of those deaths have been related to driving cars or alcohol or cigarette smoking, but we couldn't pinpoint another death in that cohort that was actually due to the radiation. So that's the high dose.

Then you have to look at the effects on the general population where the doses are much lower, and due to isotopes like radioiodine, iodine-131, and caesium-137. And so those exposures have led to an increase in thyroid cancer in young children, only in children. And we know if we give iodine to older people, we don't get thyroid cancer, even if we use a higher dose of iodine, and that's simply because the thyroid isn't growing so much and the doses to children are larger because they drink contaminated milk.

But we know in the children who were exposed, those under 19, we've had about 15 deaths from thyroid cancer. We think approximately 5,000 of thyroid cancer cases are in excess, because obviously there is a natural background of thyroid cancer which has to be taken into account, and that increases as that cohort ages as well during natural life. But we think about 5,000 excess cancers we've already seen, and the estimate from the WHO was we'd probably see about 16,000 thyroid cancers by 2065. Of those, we would expect very few to die from their cancer, simply because thyroid cancer is very easy to treat, ironically with very high doses of iodine-131. So we would estimate about 1% death toll overall from thyroid cancer caused by the radiation. So if the 16,000 is right, we would reckon we'd see a total up to about 2065 of 160 deaths, possibly.

Robyn Williams: Have you been to Chernobyl?

Gerry Thomas: I have been working with people in Ukraine, Belarus and Russia since 1992. I've not actually been to the power plant. My Ukrainian colleague is going to arrange for me to go. The only time I actually had all the permissions to go, when it was a lot more difficult to go, unfortunately the road was washed away, they had torrential rain and I couldn't actually go. Now it's a lot easier to go.

Robyn Williams: And there are some people living in areas which seemed to be at risk. How are they getting on, do you know?

Gerry Thomas: Many of them are absolutely fine. Many of them have returned to where they used to live. They used to live on their own family farms and a lot of them wanted to go back and work there. There's not so many young people because obviously there's not so much industry there because nobody wants to invest in the area. But they're fine, they are living off the land, so they are eating some food that still has a residual amount of contamination but not that much, not as much as people think, and we know that caesium actually doesn't give you a very high dose of radiation to the body. It's simply because it has a longer physical half-life and a short biological half-life, so it doesn't actually emit very much radiation while it's in your body and the dose, over about 20 years, is about the same as one CT scan. So you can see why if the doses are that low, you're unlikely to see anything increasing in a population at large.

Robyn Williams: Indeed. Well, Chernobyl was, whatever the series indicated, a muck-up, a real mess.

Gerry Thomas: It was an industrial accident of horrendous proportions and it wasn't managed correctly, I think we can say that for certain.

Robyn Williams: And Fukushima is quite different. What have we learned, briefly, from Fukushima and that accident?

Gerry Thomas: Actually what we've learned from both accidents is evacuation actually kills more people than the radiation does because of the stress of evacuation and inappropriate medical care for people who are ill who are being evacuated. In Fukushima it was a totally different accident. There was very much less radiation released, and the Japanese did exactly the right thing, they cut the food chain very quickly, so they stopped sources of contaminated milk and contaminated green leafy vegetables. And that reduced the concentration of iodine getting into the population. So they did exactly the right thing. And it's highly unlikely…as a scientist you can never say never, but it's highly unlikely we will see anything as a result of the Fukushima accident. But a lot of people are very scared that we will see something and obviously it's affecting their daily lives. To live in fear is not a nice way to live.

Robyn Williams: Not at all. How do you keep a watch effectively on that sort of thing?

Gerry Thomas: Well, there are an awful lot of health studies that are going on. They started a huge health survey as soon as they could after the Fukushima accident. So they are monitoring the whole population there, they are monitoring their health. And we are starting to see an awful lot of stress-related problems coming out, nothing to do with radiation but to do with a fear of radiation.

Robyn Williams: We have an enquiry into the future of nuclear energy in this country. We don't have any, we've only got one small reactor for medical purposes, as you probably know, you've been to Australia several times…

Gerry Thomas: I've been three times, yes.

Robyn Williams: And if you were to give advice, you may already have given advice to the Minister and the Parliament, what would you say about the future of nuclear power as an option, given the new technology there is around these day?

Gerry Thomas: Well, I would say it's probably, if you look at all the evidence, the safest technology to generate energy effectively, it's very energy dense so that you only use a small amount of your land mass. And if you're interested in climate change, actually it's the way to go because it's carbon neutral. And we have a problem in that it's not just Australia and the UK, it's everybody else emitting CO 2 as well which is causing the problems. And there's a lot of evidence that if you look at those countries that are producing green, clean electricity, they are either the ones that have masses of hydropower, which is an accident of geology, or they are those that have combined hydropower with something like nuclear.

Renewables don't seem to do it all of the time and it does look as if you combine nuclear with hydro or some renewables, that's your best bet. It really depends on each country and what they want to do. If your listeners would like to have some fun there's an electricity generation app that you can download and you can look at all the countries that are producing electricity throughout a whole year and see who is green and who is not, and I'm afraid Australia doesn't look very good on that.

Robyn Williams: Oh dear, why not?

Gerry Thomas: The UK isn't brilliant either. Well, mainly your power is coal, and coal is one of the dirtiest and most CO 2 emitting ways of producing electricity.

Robyn Williams: Is each stage more or less safe, in your opinion, nuclear wise?

Gerry Thomas: Yes, it is. I mean, things are very heavily controlled with the nuclear industry. In fact some people would argue too heavily controlled, from what we know about the likely risks. But if you look at the data on electricity generation, nuclear has far less illnesses associated with it than anything else, including solar and wind. So it really is the safest way to go. But it's up to the Australian public to make their decision. I think every country needs to look at their own energy mix and decide for itself because various different mixes are better for different countries.

Robyn Williams: So what is your own research these days into this area?

Gerry Thomas: My own research is really trying to understand the molecular mechanisms that are involved in generating thyroid cancers, and if there is anything special about the way radiation does it. So far we can say that these tumours that we see in the children look and behave exactly the same as thyroid cancers in children of the same age arisen for other reasons. So it does look as if actually there's nothing special about the way radiation induces these tumours, and I'm still waiting for the results of a very big study from the US where they've done an entire genome search to see if we really can spot even minute differences between tumours induced by radiation and those not induced by radiation.

Robyn Williams: And what about common radiation, irrespective of the nuclear industry, there's plenty in rocks, there's some in Brazil nuts, and so it goes on. How much are we surrounded by?

Gerry Thomas: Yes, you can't avoid it, we are absolutely surrounded by it. Everything you drink and eat has got a small amount of radiation, even swimming in the sea you are exposed to uranium. So we can't avoid radiation, and in fact if our bodies couldn't deal with low doses of radiation we wouldn't be here as a species. We've evolved mechanisms that enable us to deal with low-dose radiation.

Robyn Williams: Repair mechanisms.

Gerry Thomas: Repair mechanisms, yes. Radiation is not the only toxin we are exposed to, it's just one toxin of many. So we do have these repair mechanisms for a reason. I'm more concerned about chemical carcinogenesis than radiation carcinogenesis, because from all the literature that we've got, it looks as if actually radiation is a pretty poor carcinogen. It doesn't cause cancer to the extent that people think it does. But we seem to have a fixation and a fear about it, possibly because we can't smell it and we can't taste it and we've grown up with a fear that I think wasn't helped by development of atomic weapons and things like that.

But we really need to look at it again because if that's what is stopping us moving forward with nuclear power, we're likely to do ourselves or damage from the effects of climate change and certainly more health effects from climate change, than we would be from using nuclear power. So we really need to get our thinking caps together and work out what really does radiation do to us and should we be scared of it, being that we are surrounded by it the whole time. And 50% of your radiation comes from the rocks and you can't avoid it.

Robyn Williams: And how much comes from coal?

Gerry Thomas: Actually if you live near a coal-fired power station it emits three times as much radiation as a nuclear power station in normal operation. Quite difficult to take in, but that's what the science tells us.

Robyn Williams: Interesting.

Gerry Thomas: As well as other toxic compounds like methylmercury and things like that.

Robyn Williams: So coal really is the villain.

Gerry Thomas: Coal is the villain, it produces particulates as well which gets into the lungs and we have loads of evidence to suggest that particulate emissions, particularly in big cities like London, are causing an awful lot of respiratory illness among people, which is not pleasant.

Robyn Williams: Thank you very much.

Gerry Thomas: Thank you.

Robyn Williams: Gerry Thomas, who is Professor of Molecular Pathology at Imperial College in London.

And this is The Science Show on RN, where the terrible fires in California have been in the news all week. Here's Reese Halter in Northern California with his take on the holocaust.

Reese Halter: For the third time in October, California has lost part of its power grid. Bone dry, 90 mile-per-hour winds fanning firestorms from the heart of the wine country in Sonoma County, to the most populated and the largest county in America, Los Angeles. An antiquated power grid lacks maintenance over the previous 30 years, and a major power provider, Pacific Gas and Electric, having to declare bankruptcy in the face of the worst and most deadly fire, last year's Camp Fire, has left half the state in the dark. Currently Northern California from Marin County northward to Oregon has no electricity.

Global heating, with its fossil fuel stoked unprecedented ocean heat, equivalent to detonating 400,000 Hiroshima-style bombs daily, has turned the Golden State into a parched tinderbox. There are approximately 150 million dead standing mature trees, enough kindling for the mother of all hell fires. The fifth biggest economy on the planet is feeling the heinous grip of profligate consumption and the addiction to climate-destroying subsidised fossil fuels.

In two months, California is global warming solutions law, (AB) 32, requires the state to pulse down to the 1990 CO 2 emissions, approximately a 33% reduction in spending of fossil fuels. You see, California has implemented a cap and trade solution whereby polluters are forced to source zero combustion energy or pay for polluting. It's a successful model, by the way, that cleaned up the lake states and waterways from sulphur pollution coming out of the combustion stacks. California needs offset. Its polluters are looking for a bridge to get to a zero combustion energy.

So why not save Australia's largest rainforest, the Tarkine, from the pending chainsaw massacre and napalming, by renting it to California? The Tarkine is one of Earth's greatest rainmakers and climate stabilises. What if California paid Tasmania to keep the Tarkine alive, inhaling megatons of CO 2 and exhaling megatons of oxygen, as well as providing homes for all the wildlife, including our incomparable friends the bees? It's a win-win proposal. Just maybe these latest electrical outages will force 40 million people in California to take global heating seriously, consume less, embrace plant-based diets and race towards a zero-combustion economy, because otherwise what's ahead is horrid. Failing to plan is planning to fail, and that's unacceptable.

From The Science Show from Humboldt County, I'm Reese Halter.

Robyn Williams: Who did his PhD in Australia on forests. The Tarkine, there's an idea.

And here are some more ideas from our frequent guest, Alex Zelinsky, Vice-Chancellor at the University of Newcastle.

Alex Zelinsky: Well, one of the things I'm trying to do at the university is we have decided that every student gets a work experience as part of their undergraduate degree. It doesn't matter whether you are a lawyer or doing arts or business, you must go out there and be life ready. And 'life ready' means that you can do work, you've got great attitude towards health and your well-being, and you're a great member of the community. And we are putting our graduates out there to do that and we are saying it's a very student-centric experience.

And students can choose up to potentially a year working in industry or in a community-based organisation, come back to finish their final year, or they can do it for six months every Friday, or for a short two-week period or working over the summer. It just depends on the type of degree and what they are studying, but it is…I don't like to use the word 'mandatory' but highly encouraged. We want every student to have this. And sometimes there are personal circumstances of course which prevents that. But that's the intent, and I think that will make us a unique university in Australia.

Robyn Williams: And you'll have a campus to walk around on, and I remember myself having been in a really big city where I simply commuted to the college. It was like going to the bloody office. Whereas if you are in a small place, a small town with a great university, you can have that feeling of being on the campus and part of something.

Alex Zelinsky: Indeed. And in fact the campuses I'm in, this idea that they are just a place you go, 9 to 5, four days a week, half the year, is really a dead idea. And the idea is to turn them inside out and bring the outside world to the campus. So we are, for example, considering putting a school onto our campus so our teacher educators can go and use these classrooms as almost live laboratories and get the training there. And having young kids on the campus is just tremendous. And one day I'd like to think that Newcastle itself, our university, would be a bit like Oxford. You go to Oxford and say where is the university? And the answer is it's everywhere.

Robyn Williams: And what about frontier energy technologies, abatement of greenhouse gases and suchlike?

Alex Zelinsky: Well look, I think there's so many opportunities there. We've got people thinking about low-cost ways of taking direct carbon fuel cells, for example where you are harnessing the power from electric chemical reactions in a far cleaner and more efficient way than traditional coal power. And there's also other great chemical engineers telling me that we could take the coal, there is a dirty way to create hydrogen, but a potentially clean way to create where the CO 2 is taken and put into minerals, and mineralisation of the CO 2 . Very interesting ideas that can be done.

So we are not proposing sequestration. I think sequestration is a fraught technology and it's very questionable but also, quite frankly, in New South Wales in the Hunter we don't have the geology for sequestration. And so we think that to create, for instance, a hydrogen economy could be a possibility using the coal industry and then turning it potentially into an export opportunity. Newcastle has got a fantastic port. It is the world's largest coal export facility, so why not be the world's largest hydrogen export facility.

Robyn Williams: Another lateral idea, after that one about the Tarkine. Alex Zelinsky says make Newcastle an export hub for hydrogen. He is Vice-Chancellor at the university. And that's where Dr Jessica Allen works on those fuels cells, and carbon.

Jessica Allen: So a fuel cell is an electrochemical device, it's a technology which takes the chemical energy in fuels and it turns it directly into electrical energy using electrochemical reactions, so it's a one-step transformation process to get electricity from chemical fuels.

Robyn Williams: And you can use them in rockets, you can use them on Apollo, you can use them in motor cars et cetera.

Jessica Allen: Yes, that's right, so hydrogen fuel cells are probably the most well-known type of fuel cells and the most commercially developed as well. They've been used by NASA of course for decades and they are gaining a lot more popularity in the vehicle industry as a hydrogen fuel cell and more as the hydrogen economy interest peaks in that area.

Robyn Williams: And so, Dr Allen, what are you doing with them here?

Jessica Allen: So we're doing something little bit different. Fuel cells are relatively easy to manage from an engineering perspective when you're using a gas as the reactant. But what we're trying to do here with the direct carbon fuel cell is actually using a solid fuel which is carbon, and this can be any type of carbon material, it can be a coal-based material, or you can also use biomass or other carbonaceous feedstocks.

Robyn Williams: A bit of carbon around here in Newcastle too, haven't you.

Jessica Allen: We've definitely got some carbon around.

Robyn Williams: From the Hunter Valley.

Jessica Allen: Yes, that's right, if you go to Newcastle Harbour you'll see it being shipped out almost constantly.

Robyn Williams: And of course the interesting thing is the ways in which you are moving from the old smokestack industries to a completely new approach. How's it going so far, looking at this different way?

Jessica Allen: It's challenging, but it's a really interesting process because it's got so many selling points. So your normal thermal generation processes, you have to burn the fuel to make heat to make steam and drive a turbine, it has a lot of auxiliary equipment, so it's a big power plant that you need for that thermal generation. With a fuel cell it's a lot smaller, it's a smaller scale and it doesn't need all of the external equipment. And with the direct carbon fuel cell, because we're not burning the coal or the carbon material in air we don't have to separate the CO 2 afterwards, which can be a big energy penalty, so it's sequestration-ready-type carbon dioxide that is being generated.

Robyn Williams: Yes, but what is the process, how do you get the energy out?

Jessica Allen: So the chemical reaction—carbon plus oxygen makes CO 2 —normally we use the exothermic reaction, so the heat from that reaction. But when you use it in a fuel cell you separate the two reactions, so carbon oxidation and oxygen reduction, into two steps, and that allows for the flow of electrons in electrochemical reactions. So the actual spontaneous electrochemical reaction that happens, instead of emitting heat, it generates an electron.

Robyn Williams: And what sort of process are you working on that can be applied on a bigger scale? In other words, something that is as ubiquitous as the fuel cell?

Jessica Allen: Yes, so the fuel cell itself, so actually generating electricity is one type of technology and that can be used in grids as a stabilising agent or as a replacement for coal-fired power. But there is also a really interesting aside to this technology which is doing the absolute reverse, which is taking carbon dioxide and putting electricity into an electrolysis unit to make carbon. So we are going completely the opposite direction now. And if you can use electricity from renewable energy or concentrating solar thermal is the process I'm working on at the moment, this can be a carbon sequestration pathway. And the carbon that you make from this process is actually an advanced material, so it can be used in batteries and supercapacitors for an added value to the carbon capture process.

Robyn Williams: And the solar thermal, it's essentially getting heat from the Sun and producing energy in the system that way so that you can drive a machine.

Jessica Allen: Yes, that's right, so concentrating solar thermal, there's a couple of different outputs you can get from it. So you can get the heat, just the heat itself and you can use that to keep things molten and to keep things at the reaction temperature that you need, and you can also use that heat to make steam and drive a turbine, the same you would do in a coal-fired power station except we're not burning anything, we're using the heat from the Sun.

Robyn Williams: So how do you see this reverse system developing?

Jessica Allen: I'd love to see it rolled out across the world of course, but in order to stem the tide of emissions…so renewable energy isn't necessarily zero emission, so even if we moved to a renewable energy grid, we've still got to have manufacturing and we've got other industries that are emitting CO 2 . So I'd like to see this technology employed in a case where we have got renewable energy, but in places where perhaps we can't move as quickly away from generating CO 2 . So we can take that CO 2 and actually manufacture something more useful that can then increase the uptake of renewable energy because it can be applied to storage and to increase the capacity of storage technology like batteries and supercapacitors.

Robyn Williams: In 10 years’ time, for example in your dreams, how do you see it working?

Jessica Allen: Well, in 10 years’ time, concentrating solar thermal will have come a long way. At the moment it's a little bit problematic for concentrating solar thermal because the best resource is in the middle of the day, and they are a large power station, and of course the cost of electricity in the middle of the day with the uptake of photovoltaics is quite low, so they're not going to get a large economic return if they are just making electricity. But if we are going to make an advanced product, then this could help with the uptake of this technology and make it more commercially viable. So I would hope that if we can develop this technology quickly and get it rolled out along with concentrating solar thermal, that it could increase the commercial readiness and the commercialisation pathway of both technologies at the same time.

Robyn Williams: What sort of products? Give me some examples.

Jessica Allen: So my colleagues here at the University of Newcastle, Professor Scott Donne in electrochemistry, we've been making basically an activated carbon, and this can be used in a supercapacitor because it has a very high surface area, so it can store charge, a lot of charge, very quickly. So that's what a supercapacitor does, it delivers a big bang all in one go, but you need something with a very high surface area to do that.

And with the electrolysis unit that we have depositing the carbon, there are so many different variables that we can play with to make the carbon, that we can basically tune and grow whatever type of carbon we like. So we've done a lot of work on developing an activated carbon-type material replacement, and we've seen that it performs better than commercially derived activated carbon.

Robyn Williams: Can I see you using a great deal of carbon out of the atmosphere to make a big difference?

Jessica Allen: I would like to. So the technology could potentially take it out of the atmosphere but it would be a big energy penalty. I see it working in the future in 10 to 15 years’ time with biomass-based energy. So you use trees, the perfect carbon dioxide removal machine, to pull the carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. You can then combust that to make the CO 2 and pull it back into the carbon that we want.

Robyn Williams: It makes sense; trees do it well.

Jessica Allen: They do, they do a good job of it, no need to reinvent that wheel.

Robyn Williams: How many people around Australia know you're doing this work?

Jessica Allen: Hopefully a few more now. I've been peddling it at conferences and I've been talking about it for about a year now, really trying to get more awareness and get some funding to actually start working on it a bit more intensely. We've done a lot of work on the actual carbon material development but I'd like to see it moving forward more quickly and moving into more engineering and scaling up the technology now is what I'd really like to see.

Robyn Williams: Dr Jessica Allen is a senior lecturer in chemical engineering at the University of Newcastle. And that's where Ashlea Rendell is doing her PhD, and thinking about you.

Ashlea Rendell: Imagine, it's 6.30pm and you've had a long day at work. You are currently juggling dinner on the stove while you unpack groceries, chat with your partner, and also scroll through your phone searching for a new insurance product. As you stir the pasta you think; something about that company C just feels better than the rest. You decide they are the ones, enter your details, serve the pasta, click 'purchase' and don't give it a second thought.

But I do. I'm a human-centred computing researcher and my PhD investigates the way that imagery, specifically nature imagery, influences user perceptions and interactions with technology. So if we use that scenario I just gave, the task of a human-centred computing researcher is designing computer systems that more effectively facilitate the human interaction component. So looking at e-commerce sites, we require an understanding of the cognitive overload or stress that a user might be experiencing.

Interestingly, while nature imagery is actually quite common in that scenario, very little is understood currently about the way that it influences users. However, environmental psychology researchers have long understood and investigated the way that nature influences us as humans more generally. On the one hand you have stress reduction theory, which suggests that when we are exposed to nature, our sympathetic nervous system activity drops. So think the fight or flight response. Decreases in heart rate, respiration rate, generally a more positive affect. Similar to that, attention restoration theory suggests that when we are looking at nature we are more able to direct our attention or concentrate. So think things like better comprehension and memory, which is definitely something we could all use from time to time.

So understanding things like that got me thinking; what if those responses are triggering people to feel more or less comfortable with the technology and interfaces they interact with. To date I have conducted experimental research online showing participants different versions of e-commerce websites with the only difference being the imagery within the backgrounds. Using statistically validated psychological scales we've been able to demonstrate that when nature imagery is present, users are more likely to trust the organisation being viewed, but they are also more likely to spend their money and purchase products from them.

At the moment we are about to look at how we can use those responses in alternative human–computer interaction scenarios, so think things like virtual realities, mental health applications, mobile health applications to assist with patient management and control of their own condition. Because essentially maybe technology needs nature to be successful after all. Thank you.

Robyn Williams: And thank you very much Ashlea, it's very interesting. So these images make you feel more relaxed, but it's also making you more vulnerable. So while you are relaxing you should have a little bell ringing at the same time. Are you suggesting that?

Ashlea Rendell: Absolutely. I think the essence of my research is about informing consumers about the way that they can be influenced or manipulated, as you use the term, but also so that we can be aware of what tools that we can use as consumers to assist our consumption of technology.

Robyn Williams: Are you aware of any people selling using these techniques already?

Ashlea Rendell: There's a lot of research in the environmental eco-friendly product domain, that there is benefit in that scenario for eco-friendly products if you include obviously pristine natural landscapes. That being said, there is not a lot of research in the general e-commerce environment, which is where we've started to look.

Robyn Williams: I've actually seen some emails which turn out to be spam where not only are they using my first name, 'Hi Robyn', as if they've known me for years and they spray it out like that, but also a few tweety-birds or a few fronds of lush foliage or something like that.

Ashlea Rendell: Yes, extensively a lot of marketers and designers are using this type of imagery but not really understanding directly the impacts they are having. So what I'm aiming to do is inform and educate people on exactly what the consequences and triggers and influences of this type of imagery are.

Robyn Williams: How much longer have you got to go with your PhD?

Ashlea Rendell: If everything goes to plan I'll be submitting at the end of next year, so about 12 months.

Robyn Williams: Lovely. Good luck.

Ashlea Rendell: Thank you very much.

Robyn Williams: Ashlea Rendell, doing her PhD at the University of Newcastle, and hoping that the associations with nature can make a both technology and therapy more comfortable for us all.

The Science Show on RN. And in a minute, some of those machines used by MI5 and MI6 in the battle against spies. But last week we briefly met TV producer Paul Olding who works with Brian Cox and Alice Roberts, but who for years has been making good wine in England, even written a book on Brit wine. So how's it going?

Paul Olding: Well, English and Welsh wine, as we like to call it, is doing astonishingly. There are more vineyards than there has ever been, there are more vines than there has ever been. We've even got French vineyards. Taittinger have their own vineyard in Kent. It's astonishing, it's a growth world. The quality of wines are astonishing, they are improving all the time, recognised not just by people in Britain but people around the world. We are also getting a lot of winemakers and we are poaching them from, guess where?

Robyn Williams: No!

Paul Olding: Australia! Yes. My wine this year has been made by a winery with a lovely winemaker from Australia called Rob. So the wineries are now getting the talent from across the world. The wines are competing on level playing fields with French, Spanish, the new world, and it's all looking very good.

Robyn Williams: Where is your vineyard?

Paul Olding: So I have two vineyards. I have a little vineyard, my urban vineyard, which is what the book The Urban Vineyard is based on, that's within the South Circular in Lewisham in London. But then we bought a field in East Sussex just south of Tunbridge Wells back in 2014 and we planted in 2016 and we had our first harvest in 2018, and we have a few thousand bottles of that. A little village called Eridge just south of Tunbridge Wells.

Robyn Williams: And what's the range of stuff you've got?

Paul Olding: We have a dry white made by a variety called Bacchus. We have a pinot noir which makes a glorious rosé, and something called Regent which makes a very fruity red wine.

Robyn Williams: And what about the urban one, what's there? What's it look like?

Paul Olding: Urban vineyard is still going on. With all the time I have it does get a bit lost, seven metres wide, 30 metres long, also known as an allotment, just off the South Circular in Lewisham. Looking good. In fact as the vines have grown old, they were planted back in 2007, the wines have got better, and I can play the 'is that mine'-game even more now. So what I do is I pour a glass, pass it to whoever, usually Mrs Olding or whoever is around the house, 'Is that mine?' And they look at it, they taste it and smell it and go, 'Is it yours? Don't know.' 'Yes, that's mine.' So we love playing that game. So again, the quality of the little urban vineyard is doing well and that's all made in the kitchen winery in Lewisham as well.

Robyn Williams: And the secret possibly is the change of climate. Is that really what's been going on in recent years?

Paul Olding: The climate is something that many people think is going to help English and Welsh wine. We are going to get warmer, that's what they reckon, and that's great. However, it's not about just global warming, it's climate change, and it's the change which is causing us pros and cons. So we get the pros of perhaps a warm summer and a warmer, longer summer. We get the cons, which are rain at the wrong time, hail at the wrong time, snow at the wrong time, ludicrous frosts which destroyed a lot of the crop, the buds in 2017. And this year I've had scorch, which is something that is researched a lot in Australia where it hits 46 Celsius, we are now getting scorch problems in England because of those overly hot days, the grapes aren't ready for it. So there you go, it's not just Australia which has a bit of burnt grapes, we now have it as well.

Robyn Williams: And what did it come to in Sussex when you had those days of really, really hot weather?

Paul Olding: Particularly our white Bacchus (I now know this) suffer from something called Bacchus disorder. And 'disorder' means we haven't really got a clue how that happens, it's a physiological thing. But what they reckon is the Bacchus are used to 20 Celsius, 22. When it hit 33 in London, it was probably 40 on our vineyard, and literally the lovely gorgeous bunches of grapes, those that were exposed, as we have to expose them to get some airflow, got roasted. And I've lost may be a quarter of volume just because they've shrivelled and gone, they are raisin, they've lost it. So next year, the lesson is next year I won't strip the leaves, so there will be a bit of shade, particularly for the Bacchus. But can you believe I have to deal with scorch in England? That's an Australian problem or a South African problem, but no, we now have to deal with it.

Robyn Williams: After Brexit of course it will be quite handy having your own wines, you won't have to wait for the continental stuff to turn up.

Paul Olding: Yeah, I'm not going to talk about Brexit. My vineyard is so European, the grapes come from Germany, the end posts from Belgium, by cabin comes from Latvia, the shed comes from Lithuania, the toilet comes from the Republic of Ireland, the tractor comes from the Netherlands. It's all insured in Wales. When we set up the vineyard, I was glad we are EU. Where we go from now…I'm not big enough to export, so that's not going to ever cause an issue for us, but we still get things from Europe, I'll still need some posts from Germany one time, I might need to replace my vines. So yes, who knows really.

Robyn Williams: Good luck. It sounds a wonderful enterprise and I have yet to taste your wine but I'll read your book.

Paul Olding: That's very kind, thank you.

Robyn Williams: And the Dr Paul Olding's book is The Urban Vineyard. He's also a producer working on TV series with Alice Roberts and Brian Cox.

Now, did you know that my father was a part-time spy? Not a very good one in fact, unlike Mark Colvin's dad who was a top spook, often with GCHQ, the General Communications Headquarters with all those smart machines. Let's find out more.

I'm in the Science Museum in London in a very secret part of it. And are you allowed to tell me your name or is that off the record as well?

Elizabeth Bruton: My name is Dr Elizabeth Bruton, and I am the curator of technology and engineering at the Science Museum in London and curator of the Top Secret exhibition here.

Robyn Williams: Where did the idea for this exhibition come from?

Elizabeth Bruton: Well, the GCHQ worked with the Science Museum on the code breaker exhibition about Alan Turing in 2012. They lent some objects, and a few years later they were thinking about projects for their centenary and they approached the Science Museum about opening up their collections so that we would be able to put them on display and also making their staff available. So we've been working on it over the last 3+ years with particular focus on the last two years.

Robyn Williams: And you're a historian?

Elizabeth Bruton: Yes, historian of communications, intelligence and military history.

Robyn Williams: And they were willing to let their objects be seen by the public?

Elizabeth Bruton: Yes, anything that couldn't be put on public display they weren't going to show us, so I'm sure they have another store of objects that we will never get to see, but nonetheless we were able to put on display a number of objects that would not have been seen before. We have over 30 objects on display that have not been on public display before. We worked with other lenders as well, so we are the first UK museum to borrow from MI5, the domestic intelligence agency. We've also had objects which were declassified so they could be included in the exhibition.

Robyn Williams: Did Stella Rimington open the exhibition?

Elizabeth Bruton: No, she did not, I think she was busy that evening.

Robyn Williams: I can imagine. Okay, from where we are in the beginning, show me…I see a cipher machine over there. What have we got?

Elizabeth Bruton: So we have a number of cipher code and cipher systems on display. Our historic section where we are standing now deals with different historic episodes. But we are aware by doing that, that there were these rich and interesting code and cipher systems in GHCQ's historic collections that didn't quite fit into that episodic approach. So in the middle of the historic section we have what is essentially a timeline of the development of code and cipher machines in the age of telecommunications. So we have telegraph code books which were developed in haste in the middle of the Crimean War in the mid-19th century to keep communications secure as the information was being sent from London out to Crimea. And we have an entire timeline through to a system called Thamer which is used for modern PCs, although not producing key material for it any more, it's still classified until 2030.

Robyn Williams: Where's Enigma?

Elizabeth Bruton: We have three Enigma machines on display. We have a civilian Enigma machine, which was purchased by Edward Travis, then deputy director of the Government Code and Cipher School in Berlin in 1926 when it was still being used for commercial traffic rather than German military traffic. We have a naval example from 1937, also on loan from GCHQ, in our Bletchley Park section. And thirdly, one of the rarest objects we have is an Enigma Double or an Enigma copy which was an Enigma machine basically reverse engineered by Polish cryptographers and mathematicians and they produced a design for this. They made less than 100 before and during the Second World War. Only two have survived, and we have one on display in this exhibition.

Robyn Williams: So did any of those machines give you the shivers?

Elizabeth Bruton: I would definitely say holding an Enigma machine for the very first time absolutely sent shivers down my spine. I never thought that I would actually get to hold and operate an Enigma machine in my lifetime, and so it was a genuinely heart-stopping moment of just sheer joy and excitement. And I really do hope that although we can't allow our visitors to operate, for historic and preservation reasons, we do hope that nonetheless that excitement and passion and just these really incredible stories behind these objects comes through for our visitors.

Robyn Williams: Apart from Alan Turing the mathematical genius, did you get a picture of what these codebreakers were like, their background? Some people suggest there were women who were bloody good at crosswords or poetry or classics who turned up.

Elizabeth Bruton: So we have a number of different people who worked at the Government Code and Cipher School, later GCHQ, represented throughout the exhibition, and indeed others who worked in the field of codes and ciphers. There were some women who worked at Bletchley Park. We have a rather wonderful photograph of Mavis Batey who was one of the rare female codebreakers. But we also have interviews with current members of GCHQ staff, two women and one man, quite representative of the increased diversity of the staff at GCHQ. And we also have some of the objects that they use to recruit staff today, quite different to the tap on the shoulder of your Oxbridge buddy and passing them the Daily Telegraph crossword. Now they have a proper website where you can submit an application to join GCHQ.

Robyn Williams: I wonder if they really did that. So legend has it.

Elizabeth Bruton: So one of the rarest objects, in fact the rarest object we have on display, is this object which looks about the size of a large domestic fridge, and it's called the 5 UCO system. It is not only the world's first electronic cipher machine, introduced in 1943, it was considered so top secret, it was believed that all examples had been destroyed, but as part of the research for this exhibition, GCHQ found one in their store, and we are the first museum to put it on display, and as far as we know it is the only surviving example. This was used to transmit Enigma decrypts, that's Ultra traffic, from the UK, the decrypts which would have been made at Bletchley Park, through to military commanders in the field.

The first step of revealing the communications of others is breaking into a code or cipher system, but then you need to be able to share that intelligence securely otherwise you will reveal that you've broken the system and it can be improved or updated or replaced. So this is the machine that kept Britain's Ultra traffic completely secure during the Second World War, and indeed it was used into the Cold War as well for NATO and British traffic.

Robyn Williams: Wow. Yes, I see what you mean by shivers. And a nice picture of Margaret Thatcher, how convenient!

Elizabeth Bruton: Yes, so we are standing in front of a display of secure telephones, from the rather iconic Secraphone which looks like a relatively normal black Bakelite desk telephone from the mid-20th century, but there are two notable differences. Firstly it doesn't have a dial on it, and secondly it has a rather gorgeous-looking green handset, and these were secret telephones which were used by Winston Churchill and indeed others to make secure telephone calls during the Second World War and afterwards. It wasn't particularly secure at the beginning of the war. We have a rather impressive privacy set next to it which looks like a slightly mysterious large black file folder of some kind but it was actually a valve-based system to invert the frequency which is actually very easy to uninvert.

At the bottom of the case we also have a briefcase. So the changing systems of secure telephones, it's now mobile and this was used by Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s when she was away from her office, and this particular example she used during the Falklands War, including to call up the Minister of Defence to discuss the changing rules of engagement during the Falklands War which led to the sinking of the General Belgrano. So a very iconic piece of communications equipment used by the then British Prime Minister.

Robyn Williams: If I look over there I can see two KGB officers in disguise making notes. Has this happened a lot?

Elizabeth Bruton: We do sometimes have people when I'm giving tours who come up to me and seem to know who I am and what I'm doing and make interesting suggestions for our events programs. So I have no doubt that a large number of GCHQ staff will be passing through this exhibition. We welcome all visitors to the exhibition, and we hope it does encourage some people to consider a career in maybe cyber security or just a more general interest in codes, ciphers, communications, how we keep our communications secure today and how we can all contribute to that.

Robyn Williams: Yes well, having said that about the KGB, there is a doormat and there it is in Russian, presumably a little Russian house or something.

Elizabeth Bruton: Almost. So the doormat reads 'Welcome' in Russian, and this is actually meant to represent a bungalow in Ruislip in North London, that well-known centre for spying. It's actually, for those who aren't familiar with Ruislip, it's considered a quite pedestrian North London suburb where nothing exciting happens, but it turns out it was the home of Helen and Peter Kroger. He was an antiquarian bookseller, she was a housewife, but actually they were both American communists who were spying on behalf of Soviet Russia in the UK in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

When they were arrested as part of the Portland Spy Ring, stealing naval secrets from Britain and communicating it back to Soviet Russia, their house was searched for nine days. And a lot of the objects that we have on display here were either used to conceal some of the spy craft that they had or were the spy craft themselves. So they had microdot readers where they could photograph a document and shrink it down to the size of a full stop, and communicate it back to Russia. They also had a powerful radio set that they could communicate, send and receive very short messages from Soviet Russia. And just a really fascinating aspect to Cold War secret communications and spy craft in the late '50s, early 1960s.

Robyn Williams: By coincidence there's just out a book by Frank Close from Oxford, he's a physicist, all about Klaus Fuchs who is very, very famous, one of the most successful spies who sent an awful lot of nuclear material to Moscow and got away with it.

Elizabeth Bruton: Yes, so they still don't know to this day what secrets they shared with Soviet Russia because two of the members of the spy ring worked at the Admiralty Underwater Research Establishment in Portland, hence the name Portland Spy Ring. And they are pretty sure that they were sending information related to Britain's nuclear submarine program. But beyond that they were taking documents out, photographing them and putting them back. So we may never know the secrets that they stole or the impact it had on the USSR or indeed the Cold War.

Robyn Williams: How clever. Now this, as we walk on, we can't do the whole exhibition, it's just too big. There's a part of Bletchley Park, how interesting. This is open in London until February, and then you move to Manchester, is that right?

Elizabeth Bruton: Yes, so it will be open in London until 23 February next year. Then it will be running in Manchester from October 2020 to February 2021.

Robyn Williams: And what's the interest, the public interest, the young people's interest? What do they come to look at and say to you about this?

Elizabeth Bruton: I think young people seem to really enjoy large bits of the exhibition, but in particular they are very enticed by our puzzle zone where we invite our visitors to get hands-on with some basic aspects to codes and ciphers, but also the personality traits needed to work in that area, to be a code maker or a code breaker or to work in cyber security, and just the science, technology, engineering and maths, what we call STEM, that underpins these, as well as the personality types of teamwork and persistence and pattern recognition. So we have puzzles designed for everyone, from preliterate children who are maybe two or three, through to adults and beyond, and quite frankly some of the puzzles I haven't tried because I know…I fear, maybe not 'I know', I fear I wouldn't be very good at them, even though I know the solution anyway!

We are standing next to what basically looks like a small empty pond filled with large amounts of paper material streaming from a series of machines that look a little bit like cash registers. This is actually an artwork called Murmur Study and young people find this especially engaging. The American artist Christopher Baker produced this and essentially what it does is searches publicly available Tweets and searches them for keywords that are representative of emotional content, like 'argh', 'eek', 'ooo', 'ah', and then it prints out a selection with a certain time delay and prints them out onto this mass of paper that flows down from the machines into this empty plastic area, if you will.

And I think a lot of us think about the electronic content and the way that we communicate today. We probably think about our communications either just going to a recipient or maybe just sort of going out into the ether in some kind of ephemeral way and disappearing into some digital abyss. But actually this shows that we can physically manifest digital content that we put out into the world, and hopefully to help people think about where their information goes, where it's been stored, who uses it, who misuses it, what commercial platforms are using this and have access to their information. People just like the tactile nature of the fact that they can pull out a piece of paper and look at the Tweets that are on it and read the thoughts that someone else shared with the world.

Robyn Williams: Purloined from the cloud in many ways. Sometimes I'm relieved I don't have a mobile phone or use this sort of thing. Finally, where shall we finish? Oh there's so much, it's beautiful. The balance between security and privacy, and here…

Elizabeth Bruton: This rather interesting object which looks a little bit like the weirdest mirror you've never seen or maybe some kind of artwork pattern that you're trying to guess what the image is is actually top secret classified electronic waste dust. That's a lot of words. Essentially when GCHQ have finished with their electronic equipment, they can't just throw it in the skip as you or I would do because people could access it, see what they are doing, or take data from it and what they are working on. So instead they have to grind it down to an incredibly fine dust. So we've taken some of that dust and we've put it in resin and mounted it in a circle of light. So it's really, really quite beautiful, but also represents the unknown. We don't know what's on that dust, it could be the telephone the receptionist uses or it could be the most top secret anti-counterterrorism work that they are working on. And we wanted this to represent the fact that although this exhibition shares more about GCHQ and the history of secret communications than has been done before, there are things we can't know, for reasons of national security and for other reasons, there are just stories we can't share. And we did want to acknowledge that this exhibition can't be complete. So this rather beautiful dust represents that. Every single microgram has to go back to GCHQ.

Robyn Williams: Amazing! Thank you very much. Everyone should come and see it.

Elizabeth Bruton: Thanks very much.

Robyn Williams: I was with Dr Elizabeth Bruton, the curator of technology and engineering at the great Science Museum in London, where the secrecy exhibition is on until February next year. And I mentioned that new book by Professor Frank Close of Oxford about that sensational spy Dr Klaus Fuchs whose subterfuge changed nuclear history. Well, you can hear Dr Close telling the astonishing story in Big Ideas, broadcast this week, and there online from RN. Frank Close on Big Ideas. Quite brilliant.

Next week on The Science Show, birds. Where are the swifts in Britain? And how did our 10,000 species today evolve from just five surviving species after that asteroid wiped out the rest of the dinosaurs? Production today by David Fisher and Andrei Shabunov. I'm Robyn Williams.