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Nuclear Blast from the Past Might Fix Oil Spill
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Steven Chu, the secretary in charge of the Department of Energy, needs to get the agency’s historian on the phone. Then he needs to have a word with the directors of the nation’s three top weapons laboratories: Los Alamos, Sandia and Lawrence Livermore.
A side call should go to the Department of Energy’s office at the Nevada Test Site.
If he had made those calls, Chu, a physicist, might have been less swift to reject the nuclear option on stemming the oil hemorrhage in the Gulf of Mexico. We do not know why the idea of nuclear intervention was rejected out of hand. Was it Chu’s choice or did word come down from the White House that there would be no nuclear blast under the gulf? My guess is that the White House made the call.
Although the Soviets claimed they used a nuclear blast to tame an out-of-control gas well that burned for three years, the real expertise in using nuclear detonations for civil engineering resides in the DOE.
From 1958-73, the Atomic Energy Commission—later subsumed into the DOE —had a very active civil engineering program called Operation Plowshare. The program grew out of the national exuberance for all things nuclear that prevailed in the 1950s and into the 1960s, when public opinion began to turn and enthusiasm for government science wilted.
Initially Operation Plowshare (named for the biblical injunction to beat swords into plowshares and spears into pruning hooks) fathered some pretty radical ideas, like using controlled nuclear blasts to lower mountains. Others included widening the Panama Canal, building a new Central American canal though Nicaragua, and carving a new bay in Alaska. Finally, the project’s goal was narrowed to stimulating natural gas production.
In all there were 27 detonations, most of them at the nuclear test site in Nevada; but there were two in Colorado and two in New Mexico. Every test had its own name and the size of the charge ranged from 105 kilotons (code-named Flask) to 0.37 kilotons (code-named Templar).
The last and most ambitious test, which took place outside Rifle, Colo., and was code-named Rio Blanco, consisted of three linked detonations of 33 kilotons each. The technique mirrored conventional blasting with sequential charges. And the idea was that gas would be driven from cavity to cavity, concentrating it for extraction in the last cavity.
Radioactive contamination of the gas doomed the whole idea. But what worked were the detonations themselves.
A good deal is known, somewhere in the archives of the DOE and its laboratories, about how to detonate safely underground and what happens when you do.
Three things happen after a detonation: an area becomes vitrified, a much larger area is reduced to rubble, and there is a cavity into which much of the rubble falls. Sounds like what you want in the Gulf of Mexico, eh?
At the time of Operation Plowshare, most of the data was classified. Much of it has since been made available to an apathetic world.
Driven by a complex mixture of guilt over creating nuclear weapons and real enthusiasm for the science, there is no doubt that silly things were undertaken in the early days of civilian nuclear experimentation. But that does not mean that the devices did not work or that the science was deficient. Or that it cannot be used for better purposes today.
President Obama and BP have said that the best minds are working on engineering solutions to the Gulf disaster. So it seems strange that the truly high-tech one has received short shrift.
I covered the last three years of Operation Plowshare as a reporter, and I never heard a whisper that any of the 27 detonations failed. It was the mission that was in doubt.
As for lingering effects, the government has issued natural gas drilling licenses within three miles of some experiments, and in one case within a mile of where the nuclear blast took place years ago. Apparently, nothing to worry about.
Institutional memory is a terrible thing to waste. –For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate
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Bill Gates and the Energy Research Dilemma
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There is an idea that has been around for a long time, at least since the fall of 1973: All that stands between the United States and an abundant energy future is a lack of spending on research and development.
It is as though the Knights Templar could find the Holy Grail, if only the pope would commit just a few more resources to the hunt.
Tens of billions of dollars have been spent, many of them fruitlessly; and some advances have been made, not the least in the kind of drilling technology that enables us to drill miles below the sea floor in the Gulf of Mexico. (Oops!)
Much else has been researched and not come to market. Wind and solar have taken giant strides, but still require tax breaks and subsidies. Nuclear energy through nuclear fission has been researched, even as its deployment has slowed. Worldwide hundreds of billions of dollars have been spent on nuclear fusion with nothing to show for it. Other programs have gone by the board, from coal liquefaction to magneto hydrodynamics and ocean-thermal gradients.
The thing about energy research has been that there are many promising lines, but seldom a big success.
On Thursday, a new set of highly qualified persuaders came to Washington to exhort the government to increase energy research and development funding from $5 billion to $16 billion a year, and to set up new organizations to channel and manage basic research on energy.
Some of the nation’s industrial savants, including Bill Gates late of Microsoft, Jeff Immelt of General Electric and Ursula Burns of Xerox, appeared at a press conference here as members of the American Energy Innovation Council. The chairman of the group, Chad Holliday of Bank of America, told the press: “Up until now energy investments have gotten short shrift.”
That is debatable. The problem with energy research has not been that it has been shortchanged, but that it has often been directed at the wrong thing; it has often been diluted or spread out for political purposes. Farmers want ethanol research, coal states want carbon management, and the populous Eastern states want carbon-free energy — so long as it is not nuclear.
The group of industry captains is not looking at the political, social and economic divides that have negated so many past endeavors. Just when the nuclear industry was ready to enter its long-expected renaissance in the 1990s, it was broadsided by new gas turbines. If the carbon in coal can be safely sequestered, does that solve the environmental problems of ripping it out of the ground?
R&D always produces something of interest and often of value, but not always what it was directed toward. At the press conference, Xerox’s Burns said that innovation needed to be managed, and that the CEOs of the group knew that from experience.
Actually, the experience of Xerox itself may belie that. The original copying machine technology nearly perished for want of sponsorship and was finally saved by not-for-profit Battelle Laboratories. Later, when many of the innovations that made the rise of Microsoft, Apple and Cisco possible were developed at Xerox’s California computer laboratories, the company did not know what to do with them. But Bill Gates did. These two should talk.
The great Bell Labs produced optic fiber and the transistor, but did nothing with them. Management is a lovely business when it controls but in so doing, it stifles.
If you want innovation, first get rid of the managers; second, get on bended knee before the bankers.
A new attitude toward energy is needed, but first it is a good idea to know where we want to go.
With the catastrophe in the Gulf, our energy future is again in flux. The trusted has become dangerous, and the dangerous may again be trusted. –For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate
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The Return of The Regulators
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Brace for the return of The Regulators.
Many Democrats and a few Republicans believe that the nation would have been saved many disasters — from the shenanigans of Enron, the financial crimes of Bernie Madoff and the subprime mortgage crisis to the explosion at Massey’s Upper Big Branch coal mine in West Virginia and the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico — if there had been more regulation, or more effective regulation.
A regulation may be passed, but its intent will be evaded unless it accords with the dynamics of the situation. The punishment has to fit the possible crime; otherwise an army of federal nitpickers will be unleashed on the commerce of the nation. The cost of doing business will go up and innovation will be stifled.
Worse, an industry of evasion will be created. The IRS de facto regulates much of the economy and our lives. It also has fathered a compliance/evasion industry that stretches from storefront tax preparers to corporations moving their headquarters to Bermuda and Panama.
When it comes to technical regulation, the result can be inhibiting of effort, stifling of innovation, and can be an excuse to do things in bad old ways because the regulator has blessed those ways. The problem with regulation is that pleasing the regulator becomes a goal in itself, if the regulator is strong and independent. If the regulator is weak, he will be rolled by the regulated, as happened with the U.S. Minerals Management Service.
It has been an act of faith for decades that federal agencies that promote an industry are unqualified to regulate it. The policeman and the criminal are the same person, the argument goes.
But this is worth reexamination.
The Federal Aviation Administration, for example, promotes flying and regulates it. Given that flying is inherently dangerous and yet very safe, it can be concluded that the air traffic control part of the FAA works incredibly well. The supervision of maintenance is more questionable.
Air traffic control deserves a second look. There are dynamics at work which are absent in the government’s control of other endeavors.
A call goes out from an FAA terminal controller like this: Sierra Two-Ninety-Three heavy; turn left, heading two-seven-zero; climb and maintain flight level twenty-two; expect higher in ten minutes.
A great airliner turns west and starts climbing. No questions. No argument.
The flight controller is often someone without a college degree or, nowadays, even a private pilot’s license. The airline captain has college degree, a better pay scale, more social standing and final responsibility for the safety of hundreds of passengers on board the aircraft. Yet the controller and the pilot, while the plane is in the controller’s airspace, dance a sacred tango.
The company would like the pilot to get as direct a routing as air traffic control will allow, and he may request route modification in flight. But economics are mercifully at bay in front of the radar screen and in the cockpit.
So are personalities. Air traffic controllers do not hang out with pilots. It is a perfect intimacy between strangers. One might add that there are no lawyers or consultants in the transaction; just simple purpose, an immaculate coupling.
On an oil rig or down a mine, the dynamic is very different. The regulator is captive to the expertise and veracity of the operator. The workers may resent the interference of an inspector. After all if you have done something safely many times, even if you have cut corners, why not do it again? It will please the chain of command and, on a rig, may hasten your return to shore. People who live in dangerous environments are inured to them.
The first step in safety regulation must be to introduce an ethic of safety as goal. That is easily done in aviation, where the danger is clear and present. When the danger is present but less clear, crafting a safety dynamic is hard. On the other hand, mandating viable cleanup plans should be easy and enforceable.
When it comes to financial regulation, only the statute equivalent of bricks- and-mortar regulation works — laws like the Public Utilities Holding Company Act of 1935 and the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933. You cannot ask regulators to regulate risk among people whose business is taking risk. Just mark off their sandbox.
The present hysteria for more regulation is a blueprint for strangulation. Get the dynamics right, before you unleash the bureaucrats. –For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate
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Big Challenges for Big Engineering
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There is a back story to the oil spill catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico. It is the revelation of the extraordinary failure and triumph of engineering. In a world of computers, materials sciences and nanotechnology, big engineering remains awesome but often overlooked.
Everything to do with the Gulf disaster is part of the big engineering story. Hugely sophisticated drilling platforms, drills and drill bits make it possible to drill at a mile under the sea, and to go on another 3 miles into the earth beneath the ocean floor. That is awesome. The fact that at depth these drills can then drive horizontal is awesome-plus.
The blowout preventer–the fail-safe device–is amazing. It stands five stories high and is as sophisticated as a space rocket. It is a stunning piece of engineering design, which the world only knows about because it failed to operate on April 20 when the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig exploded.
No one knows for sure why the blowout preventer failed. Feeble human hands may have been a factor; the best engineering is no better than its operators.
When it came to the Deepwater Horizon, the makings of failure were in place; not on the sea bed, but on the deck of the drilling rig. Fatigue, greed, hubris and divided responsibility all drove toward disaster. As in aviation, great industrial disasters are usually not isolated phenomena but the result of a sequence of failures and misjudgments.
The Gulf tragedy will be compounded if we turn away from big projects and big engineering because we fear failure.
In the 19th century, big engineering thrived. The British built the Indian railways. Cecil John Rhodes dreamed of building a railway from Cape Town to Cairo. The idea of a tunnel under the English Channel was considered (an abortive start was made in 1911), while the Suez and Panama canals were being dug.
Like the Romans in their day, the British were committed to big engineering in their colonies and possessions. Big engineering carried the enterprise forward, opened markets and, in the case of canals and railroads, carried troops to the battle.
The American railroads united the country and laid the groundwork for the greatest commercial expansion the world had yet seen.
Electricity brought forth more engineering creativity with power plants, dams, transmission lines, and finally nuclear power plants.
But big engineering took a drubbing in the 1960s: It was suddenly the problem, not the solution. We continued to fly in Boeing 747s, but we did not celebrate their engineering. We used more electricity and held our noses as we did so.
The miracles of engineering-based comfort and prosperity were to be eschewed. We indulged but fretted, like a smoker who knows he should not do it.
No longer did politicians urge the young into the exciting world of big engineering, whether it was civil, electrical or mechanical. Instead, they talked blandly about “math” and “science,” as though these were disciplines that could operate without engineering support.
“Technology” was in and engineering–big engineering, which built big things like dams, nuclear power plants, oil refineries and ships–was out, relegated to the category of “last resort.”
Incredibly, the tunnel between England and France was opened and the French pioneered high-speed trains. But America’s engineering schools played with their curricula, adding socially relevant courses and hybrids that include, and sometimes emphasize, ideas that are far from the world of leverage, logarithm and tensile strength. Engineering management and social impacts of engineering are among the new courses that have tainted the brawny world of big engineering.
Political correctness met engineering, and it has not been a happy marriage.
One would hope that the events in the Gulf would excite a new generation of engineering students to the romance of engineering, the thrill of creation and the duty of problem-solving. For engineering romantics like myself, a giant crane is nearly as wondrous as a cathedral.
There is unbelievable horror in what we have wrought in the Gulf. But also is wonder that we can build machines so remarkable that they can lift the lid off the underworld.
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The ’60s Return
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The decade of the 1960s stood orthodoxy on its head. It was a time when alternative everything got a hearing. Expertise came into doubt; the phrase “some decisions are too important to be left to the experts” was heard everywhere.
The seer of the day was Ralph Nader. Government was only trusted as a regulator. So it regulated: the environment, the schools, the workplace, the airline industry, the communications industry, and new industries like nuclear power. Anything that had escaped regulation in the 1930s got swept up in new regulations. And those 1930s regulations for banks and utilities were applauded.
Well, this decade is beginning to emulate the anti-establishment passion of 50 years ago. In particular, a despised government is being asked to regulate.
Make no mistake, regulation is in the air. Even Republican free-marketeers are blaming a lack of regulatory oversight for the environmental disaster in the Gulf of Mexico and the collapse of mortgage finance giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
We are headed back to the future because some, though not all, of the underlying drivers of the 1960s are in place today,
The core of our crises today is as it was then: a sense of betrayal by our institutions. In banking, the environment and foreign policy, the left and the right feel they have been let down. They may be deeply divided on the degree of regulation that is needed, but the sense that key areas of our national life are broken is pervasive.
Besides the lost jobs, diminished 401(k) savings, recriminations over troop levels and tactics in two wars, and mounting national debt, there is now the catastrophic oil spill in the Gulf — a crowning failure, if you will. Taken together they wipe out confidence and bring opprobrium on big institutions.
Big is bad. Big is out. Big cannot be trusted. Big has no civic conscience, whether it is banks paying themselves too well in a time of shortage or oil companies failing to take care when punching holes in the ocean floor. Big screws up big time.
The collateral damage is that, like the 1960s, no one is going to believe the experts on almost anything. People are not going to believe that giant airliners are needed, nor that biotechnology is good for the food chain.
The 1960s brought on an age of studies which, like polling, have become a news staple. These studies pour out of universities, think tanks, government departments and consultancies. Mostly they serve the people who fund them, so they get a brief life in the 24-hour news cycle and then leave us confused.
Are mammograms good or bad? Is there too much heart surgery? Does television affect deductive reasoning? Is weight training better than aerobic exercise? Will red wine and oatmeal cookies keep you going for 100 years?
Despite the contradictions implicit in expertise, we were just getting used to taking experts seriously again. We believed that bankers were oh-so-clever that they deserved oh-so-much money for what they did. Now we know they were just oh-so-greedy.
We believed that Toyota made the best and safest range of cars in the world, and that those Japanese quality-assurance types had it all over everyone else. Ooops! Got that one wrong.
And we believed that the clever people in the government knew how to conquer Iraq and turn it into the democratic beacon for the region. Not quite.
The problem with this institutional failure is the damage it will do in the future. Who is going to believe that the next drug or vaccine is safe? We won’t believe the experts and their studies. Ditto new nuclear power plants (which I favor), bridges, roads, high-speed trains and innovative skyscrapers.
The late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, D-N.Y., lamented the decision-making freeze that prevented the creation of Westway, an elaborate and revolutionary highway and development project along Manhattan’s derelict Far West Side. In losing our faith in expertise, as we did in the 1960s, we lost our ability to take decisions.
Now it’s happening again. Thank you BP, AIG and Citibank. –For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate
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The European Dilemma: Austerity or Growth
May 14th, 2012
Guests: Darren Gersh, PBS's "Nightly Business Report"; Laure Mandeville, Le Figaro; Michael Fauntroy, George Mason University
Radio’s impact in Washington and the nation
May 7th, 2012
Guests: Tim Farley, Host and Program Director, Sirius XM Radio’s POTUS Channel 124
Elections here and abroad; crises in Syria and Sudan
April 30th, 2012
Guests: Arnaud de Borchgrave, CSIS; Ed O'Keefe, The Washington Post; and Christopher Chambers, Georgetown University
Word and phrase origins in the U.S. presidency
April 23rd, 2012
Guests: Paul Dickson, author; Carl Cannon, RealClearPolitics.com
Political “wars” in the 2012 election, and real wars elsewhere
April 16th, 2012
Guests: Michael Fauntroy, George Mason University; Ed Kelley, The Washington Times; Chuck Lewis, Hearst Newspapers