King’s Commentaries

Scaramucci’s Vain Quest to Stop the Leaks

July 27, 2017 by Linda Gasparello Leave a Comment

There’s a new sheriff in town. He has strapped on his shooting irons and has been hunting down varmints — varmints right in the ranch house.

The sheriff is Anthony Scaramucci, the new White House communications director, and the varmints are the “leakers.” Watch out!

Scaramucci has threatened to fire people. He says he may be contacting the FBI and the Justice Department. He has also hinted that the leakers are high officials who are using juniors to contact the press.

This is a strange interpretation of “communications.”

The White House is leaking because it isn’t talking coherently. The Trump administration is not rooted in policy or philosophy, and the White House staff is divided against itself; a deeply unhappy place wanting in direction and internal clarity.

So, it leaks. It leaks for personal reasons. It leaks for patriotic reasons. It leaks out of frustration. And it leaks because no one is in charge administratively: too many assistants — including Scaramucci — are reporting directly to the president, eschewing the line of command that normally flows through the chief of staff and the national security adviser. With Scaramucci on the loose, Reince Priebus is chief of staff in title only: a male nipple.

The communications failure is enormous and extends down to the inability of the press office to answer simple questions, like who was playing golf with the president? One wouldn’t assume this to be a state secret, but reporters ask and get no answer. They aren’t rebuffed, they’re just not answered.

In this instance, a question not answered is a revelation of another sort: the communications staff members are willfully kept in the dark. It isn’t claimed that state secrets and initiatives are being discussed on the greens. It’s a simple matter of the president’s recreation. Is Trump ashamed of the company he keeps?

The avalanche of leaks are cries for clarity in a chaotic administration. They are the symptoms, not the disease.

The leaks may just get worse. But the mechanics or leaking will get more inventive as Scaramucci ferrets around, suspecting his colleagues who will live in increasing fear.

Leaking is as old a journalism and was going on long before the invention of movable type. Journalists regard it with equanimity, as part of the trade, an integral part of the job — also as part of their right to collect the news, and the public’s right to know.

However, leaking does have large consequences when it comes to how the government makes decisions. The anti-leakers have a point here: Nowadays, ideas can’t be batted about inside government with abandon. Particularly, they can’t be committed to writing without the fear of them getting into the press.

Leaking classified information is criminal. WikiLeaks troubled many journalists; delicate choices in a democracy.

But that’s not what Scaramucci is fishing for; he wants to end the embarrassment of the president.

For those who keep secrets, technology has made the job a thousand times harder. When I was a young reporter, a congressman or White House staffer wishing to show you some document — to leak it — either had to tell you what it said or allow you to see and copy it by hand. This was risky, as only a few hands would’ve had access to the document or letter.

The Xerox machine changed that instantly, and the arrival of the digital age put a leak a keystroke away. Privacy and secrecy aren’t what they used to be.

But the hunt-and-kill mission Scaramucci is on won’t stop this White House — this seething hive of fear and ambition, this policy free for all, this scarcely controlled chaos, this gyre of half-formed purposes — from leaking.

With Sheriff Scaramucci nosing around, casting doubt on everyone, the leaking might accelerate but will be more devious: Tell a junior to tell friend to tell a reporter, rather than telling the reporter something directly. Email and telephones will be eschewed, or used with great care.

If the communications director wants to control leaking, he should try communicating. He shouldn’t send the press secretary out there looking like a pudding before the custard is poured over it, without her knowing what the president’s policies are or what he meant by his latest enigmatic tweet.

Sheriff, calm the chaos, and start communicating. Then, pardner, the leaks will dry up like them thar desert.

For InsideSources

Photo: White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci speaks to members of the media outside the White House in Washington, Tuesday, July 25, 2017. AP PHOTO/PABLO MARTINEZ MONSIVAIS

Airlines: The Uncomfortable, Dangerous Skies

July 21, 2017 by Llewellyn King 1 Comment

According to Greek legend, Procrustes was a rogue blacksmith who had an iron bed that he would invite to travelers to use, except that if they were too short, he would stretch them until they fit it and if they were too long, he would amputate the offending limbs.

Well, over at American Airlines, the spirit of Procrustes is alive and well.

They’re planning to reward you for your business by putting you in even smaller seats than you’re now squeezed into. They’re going to lop two inches off the space you’re getting on their new Boeing 737 MAX airplanes.

In fairness, I must point out that Spirit Airlines already has customers on their aircraft squeezed into the smaller seats. Others will follow suit.

Unbelievably, American and some airlines are going to compound their hostility to their customers by making the toilets even smaller than they are now. Soon they may reduce service to a kind of communal bedpan; that way they could cram in more seats.

But that’s not all. The airlines are already discussing a sub-coach fare, where you’d get the tiny seat and the dolls-house toilet, and you wouldn’t get any space in the overhead bins and your flight wouldn’t qualify for frequent-flyer miles.

The plan here is to get you to upgrade to a slightly larger seat, allowing you to carry your bag on board. The wise will take that option because otherwise, it looks like you’ll be paying a fee for your small bag to go into the hold. Crafty.
All this is glorious fun for late-night comedians — none of whom would be caught dead in coach, by the way. They’re all up front, if a private plane isn’t available.

But there’s a big safety issue here which the airlines, in their desire to get more bodies jammed into the wretched space available, don’t talk about. If there were an accident — and there will be one because safe as airline travel is, there are always accidents — people will be stuck in their seats because the gangways will be too crowded. Crowding makes for chaos.

The worst scenario – and I’ve discussed this with aviation experts aplenty over many years — is what would happen in those precious moments, either after a very hard landing with a collapse of the gear or a collision on the ground, before fire breaks out? Precious seconds when people in panic in the rear of the plane will most likely be fighting each other to get to the escape routes. And, of course, there will be some fool trying to get his or her suitcase out of the overhead bin.

Hijacking goes back to the earliest days of airplanes, but ramped up in the 1960s with hijackings to Cuba, and then the Middle East got into the game.

Pilots, airlines and the government knew there was a simple way of frustrating this: harden the cockpits with locks and steel bars. The White House knew about the fix, as did the FAA: I raised it with the White House, and friends raised it with the FAA.

But the airlines said it would be too expensive, which is always the first line of argument from people who don’t want to do something; the existential fear of spending money.

After 9/11, the cockpits were hardened almost overnight. I asked a former White House science adviser why the fix couldn’t have been done earlier, when people in aviation had suggested it. He told me, “I should have pushed that one harder.” Indubitably.

The unconscionable crowding of airliners, like the hardening of cockpits, will have to wait until the aviation community, the FAA and the public realizes that not only is flying in coach on an airliner today a horrible experience, but it’s also potentially dangerous, very dangerous.

Photo: “A true workhorse, the 757” 12 May 2009, 14:47 Cory W. Watts from Madison, Wisconsin, United States of America. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.

A Plea to Start Again on the Whole Issue of Health Care

July 15, 2017 by Llewellyn King Leave a Comment

The process now underway in Congress to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) reminds me of what would happen if you tried to thread a small darning needle with a strand of bulky yarn: It won’t go through the eye. The more you try to pull the strand through the eye, the less useful the yarn coming through it will be.

Therefore, isn’t it time to reconsider the whole proposition as though there were no Obamacare, no House version of its replacement, and no preconceived objective beyond affordable care for all?

Also, there should be no pre-established conditions, such as single-payer and multiple-payer; no pre-established goals, such as preserving particular insurance practices and expectations that employers will always be part of the deal; and no expectation that the health-care bill should also be a tax bill or a welfare bill.

Its simple goal should be to free people from fear of medical catastrophe and enable physicians and hospitals to care for the sick without commercial pressure.

I’ve come to the belief that big, new ideas are needed from my own experience as an employer-provider. For more than 30 years, as a small Washington publisher, I provided health insurance for my staff of 25. It was a nightmare that got worse as medicine got more expensive.

Of many strange situations, none was worse than the employee who developed nasopharyngeal cancer, a rare type of head and neck cancer. The insurance paid for chemotherapy and radiation, but refused to pay for expensive painkillers. These had to be brought in from France by a family member.

Maybe the most discouraging was a printing-press operator who wanted the premiums given to him, as he refused to see the point of insurance, although he was married with three small children. “We don’t use insurance,” he declared. “When the kids are sick we go to the emergency room and tell them we have no money.” When pressed, he said they did this because they didn’t want the bother of filling out forms.

If you think, as I do, that the system we have is less than perfect, one is immediately thought to be a believer in British-type national health insurance. Not necessarily so.

As a former citizen, I know something about Britain’s National Health Service and I think it is better than what is happening in the United States. I’ve received treatment in Britain under the system and members of my family in England are devoted to it. There is good treatment for major procedures. However for lesser ailments, there are long waiting lists. Bureaucracy is everywhere.

Worse, can you imagine a health-care system dependent on the budget cycle in Congress?

In Switzerland there is a totally private system, which looks like improved Obamacare. Everyone is obliged to buy insurance, just as everyone has to pay taxes. There are no limits on troublesome things like preexisting conditions. The government regulates the insurers. In a referendum, the Swiss rejected a switch to a single-payer system by 60-40 percent.

There also are mixed systems in Germany and Holland. The commonality is that everyone is covered and the governments regulate. That way, insurance pools are large and have the correct mix of old and young — otherwise the old will overwhelm any system.

Unless we devise a structure that caters to all, we will continue with overburdened emergency rooms, preposterous hospital charges and doctors who will pick and choose their patients.

No one on a gurney being wheeled down a hospital corridor should be thinking, “How will I pay for this?”

The chances are that when Congress has finished trying to thread the unthreadable needle, there will be a groundswell on the left for single-payer — better, possibly, but not a fit in the United States.

Meanwhile, there are too many pre-existing conditions in congressional thinking. We need a new prescription, a bigger needle and a finer thread.

Photo: CALDWELL, IDAHO – NOVEMBER 9 2016: at healthcare.gov getting ready to start an application. txking / Shutterstock.com

Llewellyn King’s Notebook: Loving the Gulf Stream; Cruising, the Global Culture; Moving Movie Locations

July 11, 2017 by Linda Gasparello Leave a Comment

COPENHAGEN — Whenever I stray from the East Coast of the United States, I’m reminded of the debt we owe to the Gulf Stream. Malibu, Calif. may be thick with Hollywood stars, but the water is damned cold. Always. I can tell you I’ve tried swimming there often and it is, by the standards of New England’s summers, cold. Really, for all the beauty of the West Coast, you have to travel as far south as San Diego to enjoy a dip, which might remind you of the waters of Cape Cod in July.

Lest you didn’t know, that’s why the number of pleasure boats in Seattle is said to be the highest on a per capita basis in the nation. When it’s too cold to get in the water, get on it.

The Gulf Stream divides as it goes north and sends one branch to Africa and one to Europe, known as the Atlantic Drift. There’s some argument about how much the Atlantic Drift affects the climate of Europe. My empirical, unscientific observation is that it’s a big player and Europe and America would both be devastated with climate change if the Gulf Stream were to cease to flow or change course – a possibility with global warming.

It’s because of this great benevolent current, that there are palm trees on coast of Cornwall and Devon in the west of England and there are even palm trees in Ireland and Scotland. In those locations, they are small stunted things, in no way like their robust relatives in Florida. But they’re palm trees. And I’ve inspected some.

About Cruising, the New International Norm

I looked down my proboscis for years when anyone mentioned cruising. I also had harsh things to say about it.

Well, for a decade and a half, I’ve been dining on my words. I took a cruise with my wife, Linda Gasparello, that changed everything back in the early 1990s. We cruised mostly in the Black and Aegean seas — and it was actually the best cruise we’ve ever taken.

It started our cruise contagion; we’ve cruised far and wide ever since. We’ve even journeyed briefly and enjoyably from Boston to Nova Scotia, but nothing equaled that first cruise. The ship wasn’t too big and the crew — mostly Greeks on the catering side of things — were marvelous.

The thing about cruising is the shore stops and tours. That first cruise took us from Athens to Yalta, Odessa, Constantia, Istanbul, Kusadasi, Mykonos, Patras and set us down in Venice. We learned – and this is the thing about cruising — that it’s wonderful because the hotel goes with you and the shore trips are usually well worth taking. That’s the kernel of what it’s about for us; not the food (too much, but good enough), nor the shows (Las Vegas lite), but the floating accommodation and shore excursions.

In 2015, just before Christmas, we cruised around Cape Horn. Amazing. It astounds me that rounding the Horn, where so many mariners perished, can be accomplished in a luxury liner. The shore trips in Argentine and Chilean Patagonia are worth running the credit cards up to the limit to do.

Linda and I have just been at it again. Capriciously, we decided it was time to cruise the Baltic and see the jewel in its crown, St. Petersburg.

For me, it was a third visit and was Linda’s first. I knew it wouldn’t disappoint and it didn’t. If it isn’t on your bucket list, write it down right now. Then go.

If you get there by water, so much the better because the cruise companies deal with the hassles — and traveling in Russia can be a big hassle, from getting a visa to finding a hotel that doesn’t look like it’s an incubator for social diseases.

So many nationalities now cruise that it’s a new universal cultural norm, like pizza and Coca-Cola.

What’s Wrong with England and Australia for Novel Adaptations?

Paula Hawkins’s “The Girl on the Train” was a great read; an original story with an original kind of heroine: she has a drinking problem. Also, it’s set in England and depends on English train commuting habits, not American. But when it was turned into a movie, it was mysteriously set in New York and the English actress, Emily Blunt, was the heroine.

Now there’s a seven-part miniseries made by HBO and starring Sharon Stone and Reece Witherspoon of the splendid Liane Moriarty novel “Big Little Lies.” I haven’t seen it yet, but the thing is Moriarty is Australian and her novels, excellent writer that she is, are set in suburban Australia. One of the considerable joys of reading Moriarty is that you forget that the novels are Australian: The struggles of school playgrounds and other aspects of middle class suburbia are apparently universal.

The makers of the “Big Little Lies” the miniseries, which has gotten rave reviews, chose to relocate it to Monterey, Calif. Why? Maybe they thought a dash of Oz would be too hard for us to understand.

Oddly, Monterey is not typical of America’s suburbs either. Maybe, also, the series producers forgot star Nicole Kidman is an Australian. Confusing.

Llewellyn King on SiriusXM POTUS Channel

July 10, 2017 by Linda Gasparello Leave a Comment

Llewellyn King on SiriusXM, POTUS Channel 124

Listen below for the segment, where Llewellyn discusses his column, “Europeans Feel They Can’t Trust U.S. in the Time of Trump” which can be read on this website, or on HuffPost here: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/europeans-feel-they-cant-trust-us-in-the-time-of_us_595f8399e4b0cf3c8e8d57e2

Press the play button below to listen.

Europeans Feel They Can’t Trust U.S. in the Time of Trump

July 7, 2017 by Llewellyn King Leave a Comment

HELSINKI — The love affairs between nations have some of the same dynamics as those between people: When they are sundered, they do not return to where they were before one of the partners betrayed the other. Trust, once lost, is not easily restored and when it is, it is changed; it is less complete, more suspicious.

That change, that loss of trust, was on display the week of the Group of 20 summit in Hamburg, Germany, and President Trump’s second trip to Europe. It was not restored, the doubts not assuaged by the clumsy speech Trump delivered in Poland. His speechwriter got Poland’s historical role in Europe right, but he did not get its controversial authoritarian role today right at all.

It was the wrong place for that speech; a wrong reading of the crisis in Europe today. It is not only a crisis about its survivability, but also a crisis about its relationship with the United States; what has happened to the United States, where is it going and can it be trusted?

We have lost much of the trust of our friends and allies and we have done so by our own hand. This has been greeted by those who wish us harm with a kind of diplomatic smirk.

American steadfastness in the world, once as solid as the Rockies, has crumbled; it has been traded away for a kind of desire to shock. We have abandoned friends tested by time not because we should but because we could.

The trashing of the Trans-Pacific Partnership was the first act of infidelity in the steady betrayal of allies. To the 11 other potential signatories, it was a simple statement: America does not care anymore. Its abandonment also diminished U.S. leadership in Asia. The result: a distrust of our consistency that will not easily be restored, and a vacuum waiting for China to fill.

After the communist triumph, Henry Luce, the proprietor of Time Inc., bellowed, “Who lost China?” Today’s question: “Who is empowering China?”

In Europe, the Trump administration has strung together a series of small offenses and insults, calculated to exacerbate not to heal. Trump has chosen to be the enfant terrible of the West. Why, oh why?

Every U.S. administration since Eisenhower has supported the integration of Europe. Bit by bit, as Europe struggled to become something bigger than the sum of its parts, the United States has been its cheerleader — even when it was feared (wrongly) that a kind of Fortress Europe might result from integration.

Along comes Trump like a loud reveler in a funny hat, outdoing European fears about The Ugly American.

Trump has ruffled European feathers in all the ways imaginable, from his initial refusal to assert that the United States would honor NATO’s Article 5 and come to the aid of members if attacked.

Trump’s renunciation of the Paris climate accord stung Europe. But so too did his endorsement of Britain’s vote to leave the European Union and his cozying up to Nigel Farage, the British nationalist, and Marine Le Pen, the French anti-EU politician. These things rankle, so why do them?

This week in Europe, I found a resignation about Trump. People who, when I last visited or spoke to them, were expressing deep concern are now shrugging and considering the president as a dancing bear, amusing and dangerous. Europe, they tell me, is looking at a new uncertain future, but one that depends less on U.S. leadership than it has at any time since 1945.

An inadvertent gift may be that Trump has forced Europe to look again to itself and to what is right about its union: Its dream of being a bulwark against future internecine wars, with or without U.S. backing. And, of course, the “shared values” that Trump trotted out de rigueur in Warsaw.

Europe is shrinking in size with Britain’s exit and the United States is shrinking in world influence with Trump’s ascent.

Dark shadows are passing over the Western alliance and the liberal values it has promoted like free trade, human rights and accessible justice — long the best hope of the world.

Trump’s Polish speech has not reassured.

Photo: London, UK. 25th March 2017. EDITORIAL – Thousands gather for the UNITE FOR EUROPE rally, through central London, in protest against the British governments’ BREXIT from the European Union.

Somebody Tell the President How We Got ‘Dominance’ in Energy

June 30, 2017 by Llewellyn King Leave a Comment

Two things are reverberating around the energy world. One is President Donald Trump’s announcement that it is U.S. policy to seek energy “dominance,” and the other a projection by Lisa Wood of the Institute for Electric Innovation at the Edison Foundation that by 2025 there will be 7 million electric vehicles on the road.

Let us take them sequentially. In talking about energy dominance the president is acting like a man in a gorilla suit, thumping his chest and making strange noises that can only be understood by other men in gorilla suits.

The goal of every president, from Nixon on, has been to make the United States energy self-sufficient, as it was at the end of World War II — a time when Texas was the Saudi Arabia of the world and world oil consumption was modest. Now world consumption hovers around 95 million barrels a day and U.S. consumption around 20 million barrels a day.

The government-imposed fleet-mile standards have done much to improve mileage and curb U.S. energy appetite. With that program nixed by Trump and low prices, U.S. consumption might for a while edge up slightly.

The big change has been hugely increased production of oil and gas from shale in the United States through hydraulic fracturing, called “fracking,” of very tight formations.

It is this that allows Trump and Secretary of Energy Rick Perry to talk of “dominance,” undiplomatic and even offensive as such language must seem. It is as though Trump policy is to kick sand in the face of anyone who might be a customer in the future or who bailed us out in the past. In the lexicon of ill-considered words in relations with allies and customers, “dominance” must be right up there.

Oil and gas abundance has changed everything where hydrocarbons are concerned and has even affected nuclear power. Gas is cheap, so cheap that it is cheaper than coal or nuclear for electric generation. The president might love coal and coal miners, but even relaxing environmental rules will not save coal domestically though exports will continue.

India and China, which burn vast quantities of coal and may have to burn more, would like to get off it. Their cities are choking on bad air and the health of their people is being harmed. That is why they are the new hope for nuclear generation.
The market is against coal as is public opinion. King Coal is due to abdicate and the men in the gorilla suits cannot save his throne.

Enter the electric car as another game-changer, slowly at first, then very fast.

The projection by the Edison Foundation’s innovation arm that electric car deployment would reach 7 million vehicles by 2025 should encourage a new interest in the utility sector because it is the electric car that looks likely to change domestic demand for oil, freeing more of it for export. If charging stations can be deployed quickly enough, the 7 million figure may seem modest.

Natural gas is already an export commodity with 16 permits for terminals issued under the Obama administration.

If Trump and Perry want the United States to continue to be out in front in energy, they might think hard about how the fracking miracle came about. Call it the 40-year cycle: It took about 40 years of trial and error to unleash the bounty of close formation gas and oil. It also took a lot science, a lot of government-backed geology and one brave entrepreneur, George Mitchell of Mitchell Energy & Development Corp. to bring it off. The government poured the science in everything from new design drill bits to 3-D seismic and GPS mapping; oil-field know-how came from Mitchell.

Likewise, with wind and solar technology, the wind turbines and solar panels being deployed today were first investigated, again with a lot of taxpayer money, back in the 1970s at government laboratories like Sandia in New Mexico. I know: I covered the first faltering steps.

The point here is that to lead or, if you prefer, to dominate in energy you need patience, science and funding endurance. Trump and Perry are starting their quest to world “dominance” by slashing the research budget of the Department of Energy and doing away with ARPA-E, the super-reach arm of the agency.

It is not a strategy for staying out front, for dominating for very long.

Photo: President Donald Trump points to the crowd as he walks to the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, Thursday, June 1, 2017, after speaking in the Rose Garden about the US role in the Paris climate change accord. (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik)

Covering the White House, From Twilight to Dark

June 23, 2017 by Llewellyn King Leave a Comment

Freedom of the press, in my view, has two parts. First there is the freedom to publish, to criticize and to petition. Then there is the critical issue of the freedom to gather the news — not just to report it but also to gather it.

Without the freedom to gather the news, the freedom to print it, broadcast it or comment on it becomes pyrrhic. The official line predominates.

Right now, the freedom to report the news at the White House is under attack and the public’s right know is being impinged. What you get: all the news that can be leaked.

Covering the news at the White House has gotten progressively harder since the days of Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, the first administrations I covered.

The Trump administration has attacked the press, ridiculed it and is starving it of critical access. Now there is talk of doing away with the daily press briefing, honored and needed. It is where the government is asked what it is doing and ideally tells the people. It is America’s answer to the much admired “Question Time” in Britain’s House of Commons.

It has never been easy to cover the White House, and history is littered with the ways in which presidents sought to affect the way in which they were covered. Jack Kennedy, a darling to some reporters, so hated the coverage he was getting from The New York Herald Tribune that for a while he forbade it in the White House.

Lyndon Johnson worked over the press corps the way he worked over members of Congress: punishment and reward.

At The Washington Daily News, Wauhillau La Hay worried aloud — often in my presence — that the file from the Scripps-Howard Washington bureau (it was an afternoon newspaper owned by Scripps-Howard) would make it hard for her to cover the social side of the White House, her assignment.

Richard Nixon believed that the press was out to get him and his famous enemies list was real. Yet he ran a surprisingly open White House, as had Johnson.

Compared to what was to follow, it was wide open. Once a reporter got through the gate you were a free agent to roam much of the grounds and to visit the West Wing, if you had someone to see. More important, you got one-on-one interviews with principles without some minder from the press office sitting in and acting as a double agent, reporting back on both the journalist and the interviewee.

After your interview, you were sometimes invited into the office of another staffer. As often as not, they wanted to know what you knew as much as you wanted to know what they knew, even during Watergate.

The best information is the information you get face-to-face, one-on-one. That has become very difficult as time has rolled on. Personally, I found the George H.W. Bush open enough. I remember going over to see his chief of staff, John Sununu, without problem. I phoned him, got a time and went over. No press office involvement. Once, he asked me if I would like to write a speech for the president. I averred.

Excessive leaking is a symptom, a cry from within the belly of the beast that all is not well. At this point the leakers are patriots, not criminals.

In recent administrations, the only way for White House reporters to get into conversations with White House staffers has been to travel with the president overseas: a very expensive stab in the dark. A European trip can cost more than $20,000, and few news outlets can afford the gamble. Even if you are in the pool and sitting on Air Force One, nothing is guaranteed.

If, as has been suggested, the daily briefings stop, more leaks are inevitable. If you cannot seek the information directly, you have to try to get it otherwise. If the front door is closed, a ladder up to the window is the next step. At the same time, relationships become more devious. Like an illicit love affair, no public acknowledgment in public places.

If the right to gather the news is abridged, the whole concept of a free press is diminished. The diminishment is underway.

Government in the dark is the government of authoritarians; not the kind of government one expects from a nation that prohibits the “abridging” of the press in its Constitution. Shame.

For InsideSources

Photo: Richard M. Nixon press conference. General Services Administration. National Archives and Records Service. Office of Presidential Libraries. Office of Presidential Papers. (01/20/1969 – ca. 12/1974); President (1969-1974 : Nixon). White House Photo Office. (1969 – 1974)

Nuclear Booms in Asia as New Reactor Ideas Flourish in U.S.

June 16, 2017 by Llewellyn King 1 Comment

By Llewellyn King

The nuclear electric industry has sustained some mighty blows in the United States and Western Europe in recent years. It might be reeling, but it is not out and it is not going down for the count. Taken globally, things are good.

The need to curb carbon in the air, to service a growing world population and the surging cities are impelling nuclear forward. At the annual summit meeting of the U.S. Nuclear Infrastructure Council (NIC) in Washington, this future was laid out with passion: Nuclear power is experiencing a growth spurt but not in the United States and Western Europe, except for Britain.

Nuclear demand is high where air pollution is at its worst and where economic activity is fast and furious — in Asia generally, and in China and India in particular.

Vijay Sazawal, president of IAEC Consulting, told the NIC meeting that India would be adding two reactors a year to its nuclear fleet moving forward. China and India are building half of the 60 new reactors under construction worldwide, according to Andrew Paterson of Verdigris Capital Group, which studies nuclear.

Paterson predicted world electricity demand will double by 2050 and that most of the demand would come from the megacities of Asia, Africa and Latin America. He said, “By 2030, China will have 15 megacities (10 million or more people) and 150 cities with more than 1 million people.”

Wind and solar energy, the other carbon-free electricity sources, also will grow dramatically but will be constrained by their land needs. Big cities are ill-suited to roof-mounted solar, and windmills require large acreages of open land not found near megacities.

In the United States, the shadow of the Westinghouse bankruptcy is passing over the nuclear community. How could a once-proud and dominant company get its sums so wrong that it has been forced into bankruptcy? The collapse of the company — which was building two plants with four reactors in South Carolina and Georgia, four reactors in China, and was engaged in projects in the United Kingdom and India — will be studied in business schools for generations to come. Bad management, not bad nuclear, has brought Westinghouse and its parent Toshiba to its knees.

But nuclear believers are undaunted. Nuclear advocates have a kind of religious commitment to their technology, to their science and to the engineering that turns the science into power plants.

I have been writing about nuclear since 1970, and I have featured it on my television program, “White House Chronicle,” for more than 20 years. I can attest that there is something special in the passion of nuclear people for nuclear power. They have fervor wrapped in a passion for kind of energy utopia. They believe in the great gift that nuclear offers a populous world: a huge volume of electricity.

The kernel here, the core belief, the holy grail of nuclear is wrapped up in “energy density”: how a small amount of nuclear material can produce a giant amount of electricity in a plant that has few moving parts, aside from the conventional steam turbine. As designs have evolved and plants have become “passive” in their safety systems, the things that can go wrong have been largely eliminated.

To understand energy density think this way: The average wind turbine you see along the highway turns out 2 megawatts of electricity when there is wind, a trifling amount compared to the 1,600 megawatts a new nuclear plant produces continuously — and probably will produce for 100 years before it is retired.

Asia, choking on air pollution and with huge growth, needs nuclear. America is not gasping for new generation: demand is static and there is a natural gas glut. Also, there is land aplenty for solar and wind to be installed.

But U.S. nuclear creativity, even genius, will not rest. The United States is on the frontier, pioneering a generation of wholly new reactor concepts, mostly for small modular reactors and even big new reactors, which may first be built in China and India but, like so much else, will be “thought up in America.”

At nuclear conclaves like the NIC meeting, there is sadness that the U.S. market is stagnant. But there is incandescent hope for the future.

Whoosh! The Electric Car Is Rolling into American Life

June 9, 2017 by Llewellyn King 2 Comments

U.S. transportation is about to get a mighty electric shock.

The days of the internal combustion engine are numbered. The electric car is about to do to the traditional gasoline and diesel car engine what the cell phone is doing to the copper-wire, landline telephone: shoulder it out of the way.

Andrew Paterson, a principal with the Verdigris Capital Group, told a conference in Washington on June 7, electric car sales will at least quadruple in the coming decade and then really begin to accelerate. This, he said, was part of a larger electric boom that would see the doubling of world electric demand, mostly in Asia, by the middle of the century.

Electric utilities in the United States stand to benefit from the switch from gasoline and diesel to electricity largely because they will be able to meet the new demand without adding new generation, according to the Electric Power Research Institute in Palo Alto, Calif. It believes most of the charging of electric vehicles will take place off-peak, at night and when there is less demand. At worst the new load will fall partly during the day, when there is a surplus of solar power.

Analysts say much depends on whether commercial and company parking facilities can be turned into charging stations as well. Maybe when the boom really picks up, even parking meters will become charging stations.

The change in transportation will have huge effects beyond the car infrastructure. Gradually, gas stations will become obsolete. Technicians who service cars with oil changes and tuning will be out of work.

Electric cars are fundamentally simpler than today’s vehicles — they will run for tens of thousands of miles without maintenance, and that will be confined to things like tires, brakes and lights. Cities will get cleaner and quieter.

Once upon a time, it was just environmentalists who loved electric cars. Now consumers are gooey over them. The proud owner of a Tesla Model S told me this week that he would never buy a conventional car again. He said his Tesla has it all — quiet, undreamed of acceleration and great luxury. And he has what it takes to go electric easily: a suburban home with a carport and a charging station in his office building in Washington.

Apartment dwellers and those without driveways or garages in townhouses will have to wait for technology to fix their charging needs. Manufacturers are striving for easier charging and longer-endurance batteries.

There are, by my count, less than a dozen dedicated charging companies that have sought to commercialize charging by wiring commercial garages and other places where cars sit. None has been very successful to date and there have been bankruptcies.

As always with new ways of doing things, there is hesitance and a hope that someone else will lead the way. I believe that the moment entrepreneurs find a way of making money from cars in commercial parking lots and other away-from-home sites, there will be a boom in offering charging and the switch to electric will be accelerated. Charging will become big business.

But questions do abound for long-distance driving. Soon 300 miles will be the electric vehicle standard, but it will not get you from Chicago to Los Angeles, or even Washington to Boston.

The speed of technological evolution is the unknown, but it will control the accelerator in the race to electricity. Better batteries, faster charging and more public confidence in the duration of each charge will all control the rate of change.

When it comes to heavy vehicles that travel great distances, like intercity buses and trucks, the conversion to electricity, though yearned for, may be a lot slower. Until smart highways offer charging through induction, using electromagnetic fields, diesel will still rule.

The earliest cars were electric and were thought then to be the future — clean and quiet. But lead-acid batteries could not hack it. Stubbornly Harrods, the famous department store, used electric delivery vehicles around London until the 1960s; maybe because these sedate, quiet, liveried road queens exuded classiness.

Like all revolutions, there will be winners: those who find out how to make money out of battery charging and those who make electricity. And losers: oil companies, gas stations, service departments of dealerships and the long-dreamed-of hydrogen car.

Incontrovertibly, the air in cities will be a winner — a big, big winner.