He has been able to scale this down to CubeSat size, using liquid water or solid iodine as the propellant.
Some three-fifths of people are against the Sendai restart, according to a recent nationwide poll of public opinion.Back in Kyushu, the possibility of an imminent restart was driven home this week when the prefecture handed out iodine tablets to households near the plant to protect against thyroid cancer in case of an accident.
The 67 tests conducted in the northern Marshalls between 1946 and 1958 released radioactive iodine said to be 150 times worse than the contamination from the nuclear disaster at Chernobyl in 1986.
Five of their top ten involved nutrition: vitamin supplements for children, adding zinc and iodine to salt and breeding extra micronutrients into crops (like those sweet potatoes).
Even marriage chances wane: malnourished boys marry women of lower educational levels when they grow up.Common responses include handing out vitamin pills and fortifying common foods with micronutrients (such as putting iodine in salt).
Supermarkets are short of food, and pharmacies lack iodine, which people have bought for fear of radiation.
The most visible sign of iodine deficiency is a swelling of the thyroid gland called a goitre.
Each year, says the UN, some 20m children are born mentally impaired because their mothers did not consume enough iodine.
The most important effect, though, is on the brain, which cannot develop properly without iodine.
All are meant to be working by the end of the year.At each monitoring station, a small staff, mostly graduate students, will collect air samples twice a week and send them to Florida State University in Tallahassee to check whether they contain either atmospheric pollutants or radioactive iodine, which is released during nuclear catastrophes.
One was that iodine in the salt could help prevent sickness from the radiation that citizens feared might spread China's way from the stricken Fukushima nuclear-power plant in Japan, which is more than 2,000km from Zhejiang's coast.
