White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

How to Learn to Love Stoplights and Your Electric Car

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By Llewellyn King
 
Ever thought you’d be pleased to wait at a stoplight?  Well, the day is coming when the stoplight may also be a refueling point for your electric car. It won’t be the key point, but it might give your car a little boost until you get home, or to your parking garage or the supermarket.
 
Electric cars are much in the news these days, as the big automakers like Mercedes and General Motors try to catch up with the space, and notoriety, that Elon Musk and his Tesla Motors occupy.
 
But the bugaboo for electric cars, whether they are the super-refined Tesla or the more utilitarian Nissan Leaf, is charging. Batteries are getting better all the time, but they still need frequent charging. You wouldn’t want to try to go any distance without planning ahead for where you can plug in, whether it’s a high-speed, high-voltage charging station or a wire coming out of a kitchen window, which would need about eight hours to get you ready to speed off with that legendary electric car acceleration.
 
Electric cars have been the dream of automakers since the first cars, some of which were electric, but the limits of lead-acid batteries doomed them to very narrow uses. When I lived in Britain, milk delivery vehicles, called milk floats, were electric; and Harrods, the great London department store, used electric delivery vans for decades. In this case the slow-moving, use-specific and very distinctive vehicles possibly were as much for advertising as anything else. Customers wanted to have them pull up at their homes, suggesting that they could afford the substantial prices that are still part of the mystique of Harrods.
 
Over the decades, many new battery types have been tried, including some very far-out ideas like the aluminum-air battery. But the best, so far, is the lithium ion battery, a version of which you have in your cell phone or your computer, and which powers both pure electric cars and the electric component of hybrids like the Toyota Prius. 
 
But there’s still the pesky issue of charging. A Nissan Leaf has a range of about 100 miles, and a Tesla Model S Performance car’s range is 265 miles. The test comes on a cold, wet night when you’re throwing everything at the electric system in addition to propulsion. Get it wrong and your only way home is by tow truck. 
 
But the technology is on the way. The limits, as in so many things, are not on the technology, but the institutions that will bring it to market. Anyone want to make a business of car charging?
 
The technology, where the power is delivered by magnetic field without a direct connection to the wires, is called induction charging. You probably use it if you have an electric toothbrush, or a phone that charges in a cradle. Scaled up, it can be used to charge cars without a hard wire: a car, or other vehicle, drives over a plate in a parking lot or at a stoplight in the road and, miraculously, charging begins. 
 
The Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, Colo., is working on induction charging; and in South Korea, the technology already is in use for buses. The South Korean buses charge, among other places on their routes, at bus stops. While the bus is loading passengers, it is also fueling. Very cool.
 
Nikola Tesla, after whom the car is named, was the Serbian-American genius who briefly worked with Thomas Edison before selling several patent rights, including those to his alternating-current machinery, to George Westinghouse. Tesla claimed he’d found a way of distributing electricity without wires. But how he’d planned to do this remains one of science’s biggest mysteries because he left no plans when he died in 1943.
 
It’s fitting that Tesla, in some small way, may be vindicated as electric vehicles named for him could be among the early beneficiaries of wireless charging. — For InsideSources.com

 

Richardson Says We Should Honor Russia Plutonium Deal

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By Llewellyn King

Bill Richardson could teach Donald Trump something about the art of the deal.

He has done a lot of them. Richardson also wrote a book about the art of the deal, the big deal, entitled “How to Sweet-Talk a Shark; Strategies and Stories from a Master Negotiator.”

In a towering life of public service (U.S. representative, U.N. ambassador, secretary of Energy, New Mexico governor, and peripatetic hostage negotiator), Richardson confronted Fidel Castro, Saddam Hussein, the Taliban, two of North Korea’s dictators, and an assortment of international thugs. He was a five-time nominee for the Nobel Peace Prize.

The essence of Richardson’s deal-making was that the commitment must be kept by both parties.

At present Richardson sees one of his deals in jeopardy, and he was in Washington last week to raise the alarm, meeting privately with former colleagues and appearing at a press conference at the National Press Club.

The deal in jeopardy involves a commitment he made, when he was secretary of Energy in the Clinton administration, with the Russians to dispose of weapons-grade plutonium, the long-lived ingredient in nuclear weapons. There are 34 metric tons of the stuff that the United States is bound, by treaty with Russia, to dispose by integrating it into nuclear fuel and burning it in civilian power plants. This is known as mixed oxide fuel or MOX.

But the Obama administration wants to end the program, before a fleck of plutonium has been processed for fuel. It is seeking to pull the plug on the construction of the facility at a Department of Energy site on the Savannah River in South Carolina, which is two-thirds complete and has already cost over $4 billion.

The administration is now looking not at the completion cost, but at the lifetime cost of the facility. And it is saying that it is too high; although that could have been calculated years ago.

The deal was signed by Vice President Al Gore with Russia back in 2000. The Russians, for their part, are burning their surplus plutonium in fast reactors, which we do not have in operation.

The back story may be not about lifetime cost, but about the deployment of federal dollars in the very near future. Nuclear industry insiders believe that the Department of Energy, which makes nuclear weapons and stockpiles them, wants to divert all available resources to its weapons refurbishment program and, in argot of the moment, kick the plutonium can down the road. New funds are harder to come by than re-purposing extant ones.

The department is floating the idea that the plutonium should be “down-blended,” meaning mixed with some secret ingredient that the department believes will render it safe for all time, and stored in a troubled existing facility: the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) in New Mexico.

“I don’t believe this is a good course of action.” Richardson told reporters at the press club event. He said the WIPP facility was designed for low-level waste … there would be a lot of opposition in New Mexico.” He was involved in that project, too, when he was in government.

On sanctity of treaties, Richardson said, “I think that [closing down the MOX facility] would be a grave mistake across the board.”

Richardson said that he had negotiated with the Russians as U.N. ambassador and as Energy secretary. In the matter of plutonium disposal, he said the Russians have kept their side of the deal. There was plenty of tension over Ukraine and Syria, and “we don’t need any more tension.” He said, “This is one potential area of cooperation that should not be discarded, and it would be, should the MOX facility be discarded.”

If the MOX facility is shuttered, it will be one of many nuclear facilities across the country, paid for by taxpayers, which have been abandoned because of other priorities or political agendas. The price is high in enthusiasm, creativity and commitment from the workforce at facilities, like the MOX one.

The dollars spent have no legacy except a sad, new kind of national monument: structures that have been left forlorn and incomplete as politics have zigged and zagged. These abandoned structures range from the experimental Fast Flux Test Facility in Hanford, Wash. to the Integrated Fast Reactor in Idaho Falls, Idaho to the sad, $18-billion Yucca Mountain facility sitting unused in Nevada. There are many more.

As Richardson might tell, in a long life in public service, you have to defend the deal long after it was signed, sealed and delivered. Not so, perhaps, in real estate transactions. — For InsideSources.com

 


Dos and Don’ts for the Next GOP Debate

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Dear Debaters,

I loved your show. At first, I thought I had chanced upon something affiliated with the Miss Universe Pageant. And I had an awful moment when I braced against the possibility of having to see Donald Trump mince across the stage in a Speedo.

When I got the two events untangled in my mind, everything was swell. I even enjoyed the warm-up version with jokes by Lindsey Graham. He is quite a cut-up for a war hawk. I am glad he traveled to the Middle East so often, but I wish he had told us what he learned there. Did he stay with the U.S. military or did he do a kind of Lindsey of Arabia, riding a camel and eating shawarma? Did he teach them the intricacies of South Carolina barbecue? We should be told.

As for that sly, former New York governor George Pataki, he sounded presidential when he chided those who would obey the law selectively. Trouble is George has saved himself from overexertion out of the gate, and now the field is in the stretch, while he is ambling up to the first turn.

In the main event, we all swooned — well, nearly — for dear, sweet Ben Carson. Such a nice man. Ready-made to be ambassador the Court of St. James’s (United Kingdom, that is) or president of Harvard, Ben would bring class to anything. But why, oh why, is he running for president of the United States? Clearly, he does not do foreign policy, banking or sanctions management. But thank you, doctor, for toning up the Republican Party. It needed it. Have you seen the Trump Tower? How gauche!

Carly Fiorina, you are quite an information sponge. Loved the way you tossed off those statistics about brigades, divisions and ships. Super! But did you have to simper over Bibi Netanyahu? You can love Israel without embracing Netanyahu who is, if you think about it, something like Israel’s Donald Trump, but more cunning. Swatting has served you well, Carly, but do not paint yourself in a corner with Vladimir Putin. Do not tell him what you will do as president. I would cozy up to him while rearming.

Talk to everyone and carry a big stick; John Kasich understands that. Wow, John, when you were talking about how you balanced the budget with someone from the other party, I guess you meant to say it was Bill Clinton, but it slipped your mind.

And then, The Donald. Could this be the beginning of the end? And those faces you pulled? Expect to see them in Democratic ads. Donald, if you make it to the next debate, read up on things outside of New York, Florida and New Jersey. There are aids for embryonic politicians that you can buy in a bookstore: they are called CliffsNotes. In no time, you will drop historical facts, mention faraway land masses, and quote Winston Churchill or Julius Caesar. Those pesky foreign names? Easy. Get The New York Times and read the foreign section on Page Two. In just one week, you will be conversant with the names of all kinds of demagogues, who are just waiting to deal with you. I promise.

Many of you are showing improvement from last time, especially Jeb Bush. He has graduated from looking like a schoolmaster all the way up to having all the savoir faire of a county bank manager. Can the White House be far behind? — For InsideSources.com



The Efficient, Stupid Market for Nuclear Electricity

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By Llewellyn King

The market is a wondrous place. It ensures you can drink Scotch whisky in Cape Town and Moscow, or Washington and Tokyo, if you prefer. It distributes goods and services superbly, and it cannot be improved upon in seeking efficiency.

But it can’t think and it can’t plan; and it’s a cruel exterminator of the weak, the unready or, for that matter, the future.

Yet there are those who believe that the market has wisdom as well as efficiency. Not so.

If it were wise, or forward-looking, or sensitive, Mozart wouldn’t have died a pauper, and one of the greatest — if not the greatest architecturally — railway station ever built, Penn Station, wouldn’t have been demolished in 1963 to make way for the profit that could be squeezed out of the architectural deformity that replaced it: the Madison Square Garden/Penn Station horror in New York City.

End of the line

End of the line

Around Washington, Los Angeles and other cities are the traces of the tracks of the railroads and streetcar lines of yore. These were torn up when the market anointed the automobile as the uber-urban transport of the future. As Washington and Los Angeles drown in traffic, many wish the tracks — now mostly bike paths — were still there to carry the commuter trains and streetcars that are so badly needed in the most traffic-clogged cities.

Now the market, with its concentration on the present tense, is about to do another great mischief to the future. An abundance of natural gas is sending the market signals which threaten carbon-free nuclear plants before their life is run out, and before a time when nuclear electricity will again be cheaper than gas-generated electricity. World commodity prices are depressed at present, and no one believes that gas will always be the bargain it is today.

Two nuclear plants, Vermont Yankee in Vernon, Vt. and Kewaunee in Carlton, Wisc., have already been shuttered, and three plants on the Exelon Corp. system in the Midwest are in jeopardy. They’ve won a temporary reprieve because the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) says the fact that they have round-the-clock reliability has to be taken into account against wind and solar, which don’t. In a twist, solar and wind have saved some nuclear for the while.

Natural gas, the market distorting fuel of the moment, is a greenhouse gas producer, although less so than coal. However gas, in the final analysis, could be as bad, or worse, than coal when you take into account the habitual losses of the stuff during extraction. Natural gas is almost pure methane. When this gets into the atmosphere, it’s a serious climate pollutant, maybe more so than carbon dioxide, which results when it is burned.

Taken together — methane leaks with the carbon dioxide emissions — and natural gas looks less and less friendly to the environment.

Whatever is said about nuclear, it’s the “Big Green” when it comes to the air. Unlike solar and wind, it’s available 24 hours a day, which is why three Midwest plants got their temporary reprieve by the FERC in August.

When President Obama goes to Paris to plead with the world for action on climate change in December, the market will be undercutting him at home, as more and more electricity is being generated by natural gas for no better reason than it’s cheap.

As with buying clothes or building with lumber, the cost of cheap is very high. The market says, “gas, gas, gas” because it’s cheap – now. The market isn’t responsible for the price tomorrow, or for the non-economic costs like climate change. 

But if you want a lot of electricity that disturbs very little of the world’s surface, and doesn’t put any carbon or methane into the air, the answer is nuclear: big, green nuclear. — For InsideSources.com

In Search of the Real Elizabeth Warren

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By Llewellyn King

I went to Boston this week in pursuit of the real Elizabeth Warren. You see, I don’t think the whole story of Warren comes across on television where she can seem overstated, too passionate about everyday things to be taken seriously.

Like others, I’ve wondered why the progressives are so enamored of her. Suffolk University, mostly known for its authoritative polls, gave her platform as part of an ongoing series of public events in conjunction with The Boston Globe. But whether the dearest hopes of the progressives will be fulfilled, or whether the senior senator from Massachusetts has reached her political apogee is unclear.

What I did find is that Warren has star power. She is a natural at the podium, and revels in it. At least she did at Suffolk, where the cognoscenti came out to roar their affirmation every time she threw them some red meat, which she did often.

Here’s a sampling:

On student loans: “The U.S. government is charging too much interest on student loans. It shouldn’t be making money on the backs of students.”

On the U.S. Senate: “It was rigged and is rigged [by lobbyists and money in politics]. The wind only blows in one direction in Washington … to make sure that the rich have power and remain in power.”

Warren’s questioner, Globe political reporter Joshua Miller, led her through the predictable obstacle course of whether she was angling to be the vice presidential candidate, if Joe Biden runs and becomes the Democratic nominee. She waffled on this question, as one expected, admitting to long talks about policy with Biden and declaring herself prepared to talk policy with anyone. She said the subject of the vice presidency might have come up.

Short answer, in my interpretation: She would join the ticket in a heartbeat. This isn’t only for reasons of ambition — of which she has demonstrated plenty, from her odyssey through law schools, until she found a perch at Harvard as a full professor — but also age.

Warren is 66 years old and although her demeanor and appearance are of a much younger woman, the math is awkward. There are those in the Democratic Party who say she needs a full term in the Senate to get some legislative experience and to fulfill the commitment of her first elected office. But eight years from now, she’ll probably be judged as too old to run for president.

Clearly Warren didn’t fancy the punishment, and probable futility, of a run against Hillary Clinton. But the vice presidency might suit her extraordinarily well, given Biden’s age of 72.

Warren has stage presence; she fills a room. She is funny, notwithstanding that you can be too witty in national politics, as with failed presidential aspirants Mo Udall and Bob Dole. She reminds me of those relentlessly upbeat mothers, who were always on-call to fix things in the children’s books of my youth.

Although Warren comes from a working-class background, years of success at the best schools has left her with the patina of someone from the comfortable classes; someone for whom things work out in life. She counters this by stressing the plight of the middle class, the decline in real wages and her won passion for fast food and beer — light beer, of course.

Warren’s father was janitor in Oklahoma who suffered from heart disease and her mother worked for the Sears catalog. The young Elizabeth did her bit for the family income by waitressing.

However, it’s hard to imagine her at home at a union fish fry. My feeling is  that she’d be more comfortable — the life of the party, in fact — at a yacht club.

Progressives yearn for Warren and she speaks to their issues: the lack of Wall Street regulation and federal medical research dollars, and the need for gun control, student loan reform, equal pay for equal work, and government contracting reform.

Less dour than Bernie Sanders, and less extreme, it’s no wonder they long for her to occupy high office; she’s a classic, untrammeled liberal.

All in all, I’d like to go to a party where Warren is the host: the kind where they serve more than light beer.  — For InsideSources.com.

The Stripping of Man: Hats, Ties, now Socks

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By Llewellyn King

Men’s hats bit the dust in the time of Jack Kennedy. Oh, sure, there are baseball caps and various ersatz chapeaux to keep the top of a man cool or warm. But they aren’t grand symbols of taste on the head: boaters, derbies, fedoras, homburgs, panamas, trilbies and — forgotten glory — silk top hats.

More recently, the bell has tolled for the necktie — that useless but delightful fashion option for men. Who ever complimented a man on his unadorned neck?

I blame Hollywood and the whole state of California for suppressing fashion by promoting the idea that casual dressing is superior. The Golden State has upended the decent order of all things sartorial for men; reduced us to looking like bums in shapeless clothes emblazoned with the manufacturer’s name.

What became of the well-fitting — bespoke, if possible — suit or blazer, craftily cut to minimize bulge around the waist and maximize size at the shoulder? What of the fine shirt in linen, poplin, French twill, silk or even broadcloth? What has replaced the sense of social perfection of a man showing his cuffs in a double-breasted Melton blazer?

Teach us to dress: Albert J. Beveridge, literature and drama teacher, 1912

Teach us to dress: Albert J. Beveridge, literature and drama teacher, 1912

This decline in the male wardrobe I’ve borne with fortitude. But I believe that wardrobe disassembling has hit its nadir: men wearing suits without socks. Enough, enough, enough!

A senior executive of a California company, of course, showed up sans socks for a taping of my television program. I’ll give the man his due: he wore a decent suit, a passable shirt and a power tie. His feet supported quality loafers. But why no socks? Does anyone admire the male ankle? Is it a thing of beauty? Have I missed out on the charm of this lovely body part?

That horror wasn’t an isolated event: Recently, I dined at a French restaurant in Boston with a distinguished citizen — an ambassador plenipotentiary to a European country, no less — who wasn’t wearing socks. Does the State Department know? Is there a protocol for ambassadorial dress? Can down-dressers be rebuked? Is this matter addressed in Hillary Clinton’s copious emails? We should be told in the president’s Saturday broadcast whether the nation is going to be allowed to go down the sartorial drain.

I’ve been checking out Chinese dignitaries. Every last one of them, as far as I can determine, wears socks. Even Russian President Vladimir Putin transgresses international standards of statesmanship only from the waist up. Shoes and socks prevail for this improbable Tarzan.

The passion to be casual is causing actual hardship. Nobody knows what to wear at important events. Some years ago, I participated in a U.S.-Japan business forum in Hawaii. The U.S. delegation head decided that polo shirts would be appropriate attire for men. But his dress decision didn’t reach the Japanese delegates, and they all wore suits. After lunch, though, the Japanese went casual and the Americans donned suits. Mutual red faces.

Does anyone really think a partner or associate in a big law firm feels good with his tummy rolls accentuated by a knit shirt advertising a crocodile? For women, this casual thing is a refined cruelty. You work like hell: law school, junior legal slave, and finally — hosanna — partner. Time for a fabulous Chanel suit, patent leather-toed slingbacks and heaps of pearls.

Not so fast. The managers have decreed it’s time to go casual, to bring out the jeans. The law-school look for work.

We have to make America look as if it cares again. Therefore, I won’t vote for any presidential aspirant who, if male, doesn’t wear a tie or plunges his feet into loafers without socks; or who, if female, wears flats and eschews leg and foot coverage. I’m saving my vote for a sartorially principled candidate. — For InsideSources.com

The Rare Promise of Thorium Reactors

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By Llewellyn King

If you want to design a new automobile, there are choices, but there are also parameters. For example, you would be advised to start with four wheels on the ground. You could design it with three, but the trade-offs are considerable.

When it comes to designing a new nuclear reactor for generating electricity, there are no such absolutes. A nuclear reactor only needs a safe nuclear reaction and the ability to harness the resulting heat. That means that nuclear reactors can be configured in all kinds of ways with considerable variety in the design of the fuel, the size of the reactor, the cooling system and the moderator (usually water).

Not only can the configuration of the fuel vary with differing results, but the fuel also can vary. It can be, for example, the intriguing metal thorium, which is plentiful in nature. It is fertile but not fissile, which means it takes uranium or plutonium to get a nuclear reaction going. When that happens, a thorium reactor appears to have advantages, from the availability of the fuel to the safety of the reactor.

Yet most of the world’s commercial civilian reactors – more than 400 — have just one basic design: uranium-fueled light water. The moderator is water.

Adm. Hyman G. Rickover, the father of the nuclear Navy, favored this technology. Recognizing that left to their own devices, nuclear engineers would come up with dozens of reactors, and would stymie the effort get industry off the ground, Rickover pushed light water. The admiral was a man who got what he wanted. So the light water reactor (LWR) became the world standard with some national exceptions.

Canada developed a very successful reactor that uses natural uranium, but requires heavy water: water with an extra hydrogen atom. Britain built two different reactor designs, the Magnox and the Advanced Gas Reactor, but finally has come around to the light water reactor. The Soviet Union went ahead with its own designs, including the disastrous Chernobyl design.

Although LWR construction steams ahead in China, and more hesitatingly elsewhere, there is a sense that it is time for change. Time to look at other designs and fuels.

In the United States, the Department of Energy has stimulated interest in a new generation of small modular reactorsand some ideas, which got pushed aside by light water technology, are doggedly holding on and even fighting back. Among these are various gas reactor concepts and fast reactors, where the neutron flux is not slowed down and which can do amazing things, including burning a certain proportion of nuclear waste.

The molten salt thorium reactor continues to have its advocates, although this technology is not included in DOE’s small modular reactor program. It is not a new idea, but it is one that has been given short shrift from the nuclear establishment in recent years. Promising work on it was done at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee in the 1960s, under the legendary scientist and laboratory director Alvin Weinberg. He died in 2006, and I was lucky to have known him. 

Proposed thorium molten salt research reactor. Source: Thorium Energy Alliance

Proposed thorium molten salt research reactor. Source: Thorium Energy Alliance

When I attended the Thorium Energy Alliance annual conference, held in Palo Alto, Calif., this year, I felt I had stumbled into an old-fashioned revival meeting. They are believers. Work on thorium-fueled reactors is ongoing in China, India and Russia.

But the best hope for thorium future may not lie in the nuclear sphere at all. It may rest with rare earths, and the global appetite for these in a high-tech world. A simple way to understand rare earths is that in technology they are great multipliers, making products in consumer electronics, computers and networks, communications, electricity generation, health care, advanced transportation, and across a wide range of defense materiel, more effective. With a small application, say to the turbine in a wind generator, the efficiency may increase several times.

Rare earths — which are not really rare at all — are found in conjunction with thorium, often in phosphate mining. When the world gets serious about the rare earths supply, it has to get serious about thorium, especially in the United States.The Thorium Energy Alliance would like to see thorium put into a national stockpile, so that it is available when the pendulum in reactor design swings to thorium, and that becomes the future. 

Can the 17 rare earth elements become the thorium reactor’s enabler? Some devoutly believe so. — For the InsideSources news service.

 

U.S. Loves Engineers, Treats Them Badly

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We need more engineers. Go forth and study engineering for the future of the nation. Math and engineering are the keys to maintaining our place in the world and keeping the Chinese, and a few others, at bay.

That is the urging of our political class, whether they are appointed public officials or elected politicians; or whether they are members of the thinking and writing class. Taken collectively, they might be called “the exhortationists.”

But there is a problem: We do not treat engineers very nicely — at least not those who are federal employees or contractors. The very politicians who lead in exhorting our young to become engineers are those who treat engineers as disposable workers.

The government starts many projects and finishes few. A change of administration, a shortage of money, or some other excuse and the government shelves the project.

The impact on engineers is devastating. They have often relocated their families to the site of the project and — wham! — it is canceled.

It is not only that this rough treatment has a huge impact on families – and engineers are not that well-paid (median income is $80,000, and petroleum engineers are the highest-paid) – but also the psychological damage is considerable.

Engineering a new project is exciting but also demanding. Men and women throw themselves into what is a giant creative undertaking, eating up years of lives, demanding the most extreme effort. It is shattering when there is a sudden political decision to cancel a project.

To look at a bridge or a locomotive and say, “I built that,” “I made a difference,” is much of the engineer’s reward. Marc Goldsmith, a fourth-generation engineer, who has worked on 16 projects in nuclear power which have been canceled, says that many engineers get so frustrated they leave the profession and go into law or finance, and never face a logarithm again. He says the government treats highly educated engineers like day laborers: expendable.

Goldsmith, a former president of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, says the heartbreak of a canceled project to the engineers is terrible and destructive of the can-do engineering culture.

The hundreds of engineers involved in a big engineering project do not do their job just for the money, but for the satisfaction that they solved a problem and made a thing that worked, whether it was a mega-passenger aircraft, a spindly skyscraper or a flood-control gate.

We now live in a world of project ghosts, where public policy (politics) has said “go,” and has said later, with the same passion, “abandon.”

Clarence L. “Kelly” Johnson, the genius founder of the Lockheed secret division of engineers, dubbed Skunk Works, in Burbank, Calif., told me before he died in 1990 that some of the starts-and-stops and abrupt cancellations of military projects made him sick. The Skunk Works, which brought us such legends as the U-2 and the SR-71, to name a few, was also instructed by the government to eradicate any trace of other projects that were far along. “Not only were they canceled, but they had to be expunged,” he told me.

Nuclear has been especially hard hit by government policy perfidy. In today’s shame roster, Yucca Mountain, the nuclear waste repository and the pride of thousands of engineers, was abandoned by the incoming Obama administration in a deal with Harry Reid, the Democratic senator from Nevada and Senate majority leader. Good-bye to $15 billion in taxpayer money; good-bye to a nuclear waste option; and goodbye to all that intricate engineering inside a mountain.

Now the administration is taking its policy sledgehammer to another engineering project: one it supported until it didn’t support it anymore. It is trying to end the program to build a plant to blend surplus weapons-grade plutonium with uranium and burn it up in reactors as uranium oxide, or MOX, as it is known.

The contractor – a consortium of Chicago Bridge & Iron Company and Areva, the French firm – says the plant is 67-percent complete and employs 300 engineers, out of a total workforce of some 1,800, at the Department of Energy site near Aiken, S.C. Now this big engineering project, which is another way of dealing with nuclear waste, is in the government’s sights. — For the InsideSources news service

Obama’s Second Blow to a Nuclear Waste Solution

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When the Obama administration came into power, one of its first actions was to end work on the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository in Nevada. In so doing, it delivered a shuddering blow to the U.S. nuclear industry, trashing the project when it was nearly ready to open. The cost to taxpayers was about $15 billion.

Now the administration is going through the motions to suspend another costly nuclear waste investment when it is about 67 percent complete. Money expended: $4.5 billion. Shutdown cost: $1 billion.

The object of its latest volte face is the Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility (MFFF) on the Department of Energy’s Savannah River site in South Carolina. Work started on the facility in 2007, with a 2016 startup envisaged.

But unlike Yucca Mountain, few people outside of the nuclear industry know about the genesis and purpose of the MFFF project.

The project was initiated as a result of a 2000 agreement with the Russians, later amended, in which both countries agreed to dispose of no less than 34 metric tons of excess weapons-grade plutonium — the transuranic element that is the key component of a modern nuclear weapon, and remains radioactive essentially forever.

The DOE’s plan was for the facility to mix the plutonium with uranium to create a fuel for civil nuclear reactors to produce electricity. This recycling technology, developed in the United States originally, has been used in France since 1995.

The DOE has not yet taken a wrecking ball to the MFFF, but it is taking the first steps toward demolition. On June 25, the DOE issued a press release that the industry read as a precursor to a death warrant. The department announced that it was creating a “Red Team,” headed by Thom Mason, director of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Oak Ridge, Tenn., to review “plutonium disposition options and make recommendations.”

The DOE statement said the team would “assess the MOX [mixed oxide] fuel approach, the downblending and disposal approach, and any other approaches the team deems feasible and cost effective.”

Industry sources say the choice is between the MOX approach and so-called downblending. In that application, the plutonium is not burned up but is spiked and mixed with a modifier that makes it unusable in weapons. Then it would be disposed either in the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in Carlsbad, N.M., or in a new repository, if one is commissioned.

The American Association for the Advancement of Science has been pushing the downblending option. But it is using numbers that many believe to be extremely speculative. They come from a private consulting firm hired by the DOE, Aerospace Corporation.

The first number is that the life-cycle cost of the MFFF would be $30 billion, while the life-cycle cost for downblending would be only $9 billion. These numbers are contested by the contractor building the facility, a joint venture between the construction firm Chicago Bridge & Iron Company and the French nuclear technology giant Areva. They point out that plutonium has never been downblended and that the WIPP in New Mexico has had its own problems. On Feb. 5, 2014, the plant closed after a salt truck caught fire; there was an unrelated radiological release nine days later. The plant is still closed.

It is believed that Secretary of Energy Ernest Moniz favors the MFFF approach as a permanent and scientifically attractive solution, rather than burying the plutonium in New Mexico or elsewhere. However, he may be overruled by the White House and the military chiefs, who know that they are going to have to raise money on a huge scale for nuclear weapons modernization, in light of the deteriorated relationship with Russia and China’s continuing military buildup.

If the MFFF is canceled, it will join a long list of nuclear projects that the government has ordered up and canceled later, often with a huge waste of public money. Another negative is the wastage of engineering talent. Families move to sites, buy houses and send their children to local schools. Then come the pink slips and years of demanding engineering effort are nixed by policy, politics and general incoherence in Washington.

Wind of Change Challenging Utilities

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On Feb. 3, 1960 in Cape Town, British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan shook up what was still the British Empire in Africa by telling the Parliament of South Africa that “the wind of change is blowing through this continent.”

His remarks weren’t well received by those who that thought it was premature, and that Britain would rule much of Africa for generations. The British ruling class in Africa – the established order — was shaken.

But Macmillan’s speech was, in fact, a tacit recognition of the inevitable. It was the signaling of a brave new world in which Britain would grant independence to countries from Nigeria to Botswana and Kenya to Malawi. Britain would not attempt to hold the Empire together. His speech was seminal, in that Britain had signaled that things would never ever be the same.

To me, the appearance of investor and entrepreneur Elon Musk at the Edison Electric Institute’s annual convention in New Orleans was a “wind of change” moment for the august electric utility. It was a signal that the industry was coming to terms, or trying to come to terms, with new forces that are challenging it as a business proposition in a way that it hasn’t been challenged in a history of more than 100 years.

But whereas Britain could swallow its pride and start a withdrawal from its former possessions, the electric industry faces quite a different challenge: How can it serve its customers and honor its compact with them when people like Musk, who is the non-executive chairman of the aggressive company SolarCity, and a passionate advocate of solar electricity, and Google are moving into the electric space?

At EEI’s annual convention, Musk didn’t tell his audience what he thought would happen to the utilities as their best customers opted to leave the grid, or to rely on it only in emergencies, while insisting that they should be allowed to sell their own excess generation back to the grid. Musk also didn’t venture an opinion on the future of the grid — and his interlocutor, Ted Craver, chairman and CEO of Rosemead, Calif.-based Edison International, didn’t press him.

Instead Musk talked glowingly about the electrification of transportation, implying — but not saying outright — that the electric pie would grow with new technologies like his Tesla Motors’ electric car.

The CEOs of EEI’s board were ready for the press by the time they held a briefing a day after Musk’s opening appearance. They spoke of “meeting the challenges as we have always met the challenges” and of “evolving” with the new realities. Gone from recent EEI annual meetings was CEO talk of their business model being “broken.”

The great dark cloud hanging over the industry is that of social justice. As the move to renewables becomes a flood, enthusiastically endorsed by such disparate groups as the Tea Party and environmentalists, the Christian right and morally superior homeowners, and companies like SolarCity and First Solar, the poor may have difficulty keeping their heads above water.

The grid, the lifeline of U.S. social cohesion, remains at threat. Utilities are jumping into the solar business, but they have yet to reveal how selling or leasing rooftop units — as the Southern Company is about to do in Georgia — is going to save the grid, or how the poor and city dwellers are going to be saved from having to pay more and more for the grid while suburban fat cats enjoy their sense that they’re saving the planet.

My sense is that in 10 years, things will look worse than they do today; that an ill wind of change will have reduced some utilities to the pitiful state of Amtrak — a transportation necessity that has gobbled up public money but hasn’t restored the glory days of rail travel.

People like myself — I live in an apartment building — have reason to fear the coming solar electric world, for we will be left out in the cold. The sun will not be shining on those of us who still need the grid. It needs to be defended. — This column was previously published in Public Utilities Fortnightly.