White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

A Tale of Two Technologies

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It was the best of outcomes, it was the worst of outcomes.

The nation is awash in natural gas and oil. This did not just happen: It is the result of a long and fruitful collaboration between the government and private industry to develop advanced hydraulic fracturing. But one corporation and one man stand out: Mitchell Energy and its late visionary founder, George Phydias Mitchell.

Whenever I point this out I get a flood of mail, often abusive, claiming that modern fracking was a natural development of the traditional stimulation techniques used in the oil patch for many decades.

I love the story of fracking because it proves a lot of truths about how things get done.

First, the private sector needed to realize there were better ways of doing things, and that scientific resources in seismic and mapping would be essential. They also needed a better drill bit.

Enter Sandia National Laboratory. Government support for advanced drilling and extraction began in 1976 and continued through the 1980s and 1990s. Commercial exploitation began in the 1990s and exploded a decade later.

Previous government ideas about fracking were a little crazy and featured huge underground explosions using nuclear devices. Yes, just a little bomb was what was proposed. There were at least two government programs aimed at nuclear stimulation of natural gas in the 1950s and 1960s: One was called Wagon Wheel and the other, Gasbuggy.

Back in those days, nuclear was popular and people wanted it to have civilian uses of all kinds, possibly as an expiation for the bomb. Anyway nuclear gas stimulation ran into an immutable problem: the gas thus produced was radioactive. Not the kind of blue flame you want on your stovetop.

The nuclear enthusiasts, led by the congressional Joint Committee on Atomic Energy and the Atomic Energy Commission withdrew. Still, many were convinced that there would be a fix if the programs would just be allowed to continue. These programs, well, bombed. There were contractors, but no private partners.

Another tale of the government going it alone in energy had a dismal end. It was a program at Los Alamos National Laboratory to produce geothermal steam in a new way. The idea was scientifically sound. Los Alamos sits on an extinct volcano and deep in the earth there are what are known, rather unscientifically, as “hot rocks.” The plan was to drill into these heated formations, pour in some water and, wham, there would be steam aplenty to drive turbines on the surface.

This program was the brainchild of Los Alamos, and I crawled over the site in the early days. Enthusiasm was abundant. It seemed to be an elegant addition to the geothermal resource base. However, there was too much government, in the form of the national lab, and not enough input from commercial geothermal operators.

After 17 years, the government funding was threatened, and I was invited to what turned out to be the burial for the project.

Finally, the government people met their commercial opposites and it didn’t go well. The scientists knew, down to the smallest microbe, life down the well. They had oodles of data but it was the wrong data. In commercial geothermal, the cardinal question is the projected life of the reservoir. Sadly, Los Alamos had not kept records from which that could be calculated. The scientists had not thought of that necessity.

Then there were questions about what to do with the brine that would be a pollution problem when discharged from the turbine on the surface of the fragile high desert. There will be no brine problem, said Los Alamos. “We’ll not bring the waste water to the surface. We’ll use a heat exchanger ,and the brine will dissipate down the well.” The commercial operators said, “That won’t work. Your temperatures are not hot enough to use a heat exchanger. You’ll have to bring the steam to the surface and deal with it there after it comes out of the turbine. We’ve tried heat exchangers down geothermal wells and the heat degradation is too great. No deal.”

This is tale a tale of huge success and dismal failure, and it has a moral: Public-private partnerships can work. The government, on its own, gets off track and screws up with our money. But private industry needs the government to shoulder the risk and provide its huge resources of capital and science to further the public interest.  — ​This column was previously published in Public Utilities Fortnightly.


The Unsinkable Donald Trump

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How many ways do I love Donald Trump, presidential candidate?

I love Donald Trump because he lives in a parallel universe.

I love Donald Trump because he is preposterous.

I love Donald Trump because he is outrageous.

I love Donald Trump because he is vulgar.

I love Donald Trump because he is an embarrassment.

I love Donald Trump because he is simplistic.

I love Donald Trump because he loves money: his.

I love Donald Trump because he makes a mockery of capitalism.

I love Donald Trump because he has trashed New York, Atlantic City and Los Angeles with tasteless structures.

I love Donald Trump because he lives in a parallel universe.

I love Donald Trump because he is an alien.

I love Donald Trump because he makes all other political grotesques look normal.

I love Donald Trump because he has the audacity to think he should be president.

I love Donald Trump because he loves Donald Trump.

It is the sheer ego of the man that overwhelms. Not since William Shakespeare created Malvolio in “Twelfth Night” has there been such a human edifice of self-adulation. Malvolio, one of Shakespeare’s enduring characters, has — as Trump would have us believe of himself — moral standards. But he has arrogance as high as the Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, and he is lambasted for being full of self-love.

Malvolio is a character in a comedy written in 1601. To measure The Donald, we must do so against the towering clowns of today.

First, let us take a look at Boris Johnson. He is painted in broad brushstrokes in British politics. He has been in many predicaments, from infidelity to just recently infuriating London’s famous taxi drivers by swearing at them – and from atop his bicycle, no less.

But Boris has also been a successful mayor of London (He saved the double-decker buses. Thank you.) and a vigorous performer in the House of Commons. And he is an odds-on favorite for Conservative prime minister if David Cameron should falter.

Boris is a classicist with a colossal ego, who hints that he is comparable to Pericles, the great statesman, orator, patron of the arts and general during the Golden Age of Athens from 460-429 B.C. He has a plaster cast of Pericles in his office, and has even compared London to Athens. One suspects Trump has a statue of himself in his office for religious purposes.

How about Sarah Palin? We’re getting warmer. She clubs halibut, decapitates turkeys (Watch out, Donald!) and somehow convinced some Republican kingmakers that she was of presidential timber. Like Trump, she was more of an entertainment on television than a serious politician — although we were getting close and if voters had not intervened, we might have had Palin a heartbeat away from the presidency.

When it comes to naked love of self, Trump is up there with the more extreme Roman emperors. Think Nero, who declared himself a god. But that might be a demotion for Trump.

You have got to love a man who can bring Iran into the fold in a day, humble China, befriend Vladimir Putin and make America “great again.” One wonders if he can do it all in six days.

I love Trump because Malvolio’s words fit, “Be not afraid of greatness: Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon ’em.”

 


The Case for American Knighthoods

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I may have a faded English accent, but I am a true blue American — and I have been for five decades. I do not think that everything that comes across Atlantic from Britain ought to be adopted here.

I do not believe that there is any virtue in driving on the other side of the road. And I do not believe that every British television program is unassailably wonderful.

While I think that the House of Commons is a fabulous entertainment, but it is not necessarily the best way to govern the United Kingdom, particularly in this time of nationalist stress. I have lived in London, but I do not yearn to take up residence there again.

However, there is one feature of British life that I think would benefit the United States substantially: the introduction of an honors system to reward exemplary people in our society.

What titles we have in the United States are clung to. Former senators still call themselves senator; governors, governor; and ambassadors, ambassador. A few Ph.Ds persist in calling themselves Dr., and most people would like to have a title other than Mr., or Ms. in front of their name. Even firmly republican countries in Europe, like France and Italy, have clung to their aristocratic titles.

Well, we do not want an aristocracy here, but it would be grand if we could single out contributions to our well-being with a nifty title. Various eminent Americans have been awarded honorary titles, but they can not use them. What is the point of a title, if you can not call a restaurant and say, “Sir John Doe, here. I would like a table by the window.”

Here are some exceptional people who I would make honorary knights or dames:

Arise, Sir Brian Lamb, creator of C-SPAN and a massive contributor to television and the understanding of American politics.

Arise, Sir David Bell, a dedicated general practitioner, who treats victims of Myalgic Encephalomyelitis, also known as Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, in the northwest corner of New York state. Bell has tended indigent patients since the disease broke out in the village of Lyndonville, NY, in 1985.

Arise, Sir Joe Madison (The Black Eagle), activist and broadcaster, who has championed the cause of justice for African-Americans and has fought modern slavery in Africa.

Arise, Dame Marin Alsop, music director of the Baltimore Symphony, who is a visionary conductor and a great contributor to the public good through her promotion of American music and classical music, her mentorship to young musicians, and her founding of OrchKids, a music education program for inner city Baltimore children.

Much of the British system of honorary titles should be left in Britain. Twice every year, on the Queen’s birthday and at New Year, a list of new honorees is published, and long-serving but unrecognized civil servants and military personnel hope to be on the list. The types of honors include: Knights and Dames, The Order of the Bath, Order of St. Michel and St. George, Order of the Companions Honor, and Orders of the British Empire. Just in case you are getting confused, these honors do not include the ancient titles of duke, marquess, earl or lord. But the monarch does mint a title now an again, like Her Highness Duchess of Cambridge, conferred on Prince William’s wife, Kate.

No, you have to keep the honorary title simple: knight or dame, awarded for exemplary achievement or service. On my honors list I would include distinguished people in the arts and sciences, educators, entrepreneurs and inventors, humanitarians, retired politicians (provided they promise not to run for office again). I think we should have Sir Bob Dole, Lady Olympia Snowe, and, if she were alive today, Lady Barbara Jordan.

On my watch list for recognition are Warren Buffett, Elon Musk, Wynton Marsalis, and Dean Kamen. If you would want to recognize someone in journalism, Sir Llewellyn King has a nice ring. 

The Glass Tower Life of the Super-Rich

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You and I live in houses, apartments, coops and condos, and flats. The super-rich — or is it the mega-rich or the ultra-rich? — live in “residences.” Well, they own them and sometimes they take up residence in one of their homes, so maybe the name is appropriate. In real estate speak, if it costs north of $5 million, it is a residence.

I get this not from the Oxford English Dictionary, but from the advertisements in The New York Times for living space in New York City. The city is one of a few places where the incalculably rich want to have a residence. And they shell out big bucks — bucks beyond the dreams of common avarice — to get a pad there.

Other cities where the rich feel at home are London, Monaco and Dubai. There is God Almighty-expensive real estate in Hong Kong and Mumbai (the world’s most expensive), but not all the new billionaires want to live there. They want the best of the West.

The real estate rush comes from the new billionaires. Whereas it was once the super-rich of Europe, known as Eurotrash, who sought the marble and concierge life in Manhattan towers, it is now the unfathomably rich from China, India and Russia who have ushered in a new Gilded Age with more wealth than Americans of the Gilded Age before World War I ever could have dreamed as they journeyed between Fifth or Park avenues and Newport, RI. Call them “Globotrash” — and watch them push up prices for everyone, as real estate moguls buy old buildings in Manhattan and demolish them to build luxury towers that rise higher than 90 floors.

Central London has gone, as far as ordinary Londoners are concerned. They have to commute further and further to work in the neighborhoods where they once lived. New York City is not much better: the Globotrash push out the middle class and the poor.

The skyline of Manhattan tells this new Gilded Age story: booming construction of spindly glass towers, so thin they seem even higher than their very real height.

Look in awe at 432 Park Avenue, the luxury condo which stands at 1,396 feet, slightly taller than One World Trade Center. Or the stunning new residence, One57: It rises to 90 floors with prices from a paltry $6 million for a one-bedroom to a penthouse for a god at $94 million. Now, we are talking residence.

The principal selling point for these pieces of fanciful engineering is that you get a view of Central Park. It is all, apparently about, privacy and views. Well, Central Park is nice to look at, but it is not one of the wonders of the world.

As for privacy, wait a minute. While you might want to take in the views of Manhattan as you soak in one of the grand bathrooms’ Carrara marble tubs, and then emerge in the buff to get another look at the views, for which you have paid so extravagantly, you had better watch out. I hear the paparazzi are getting camera-equipped drones. You see the park, and their cameras see you.

One57 has some of the best blue-veined marble ever quarried in Italy. In fact, there is so much of it in the building that an imaginative lawyer might be able to claim that it is a territorial extension of Italy. A part of Italy on Manhattan Island, Mamma mia!

And as the Globotrash are not known for their kitchen skills, it will be again up to the imagination of New York City to get another iconic Italian product, pizza, up there.

Remembering a Generation Defined by Duty

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Seventy years ago, we celebrated the end of World War II in Europe. That celebration is not the first memory of my childhood, but it is one of the clearest.

I was a five-year-old boy in Cape Town, South Africa, proudly displaying a paper Union Jack, the familiar British flag, and watching the victory parade. I often wonder where the flags came from – before offset printing and photocopying – in time for the parade. Someone knew victory was at hand.

There was a palpable, universal happiness – though more subdued, I am told, than the outbursts which greeted the end of World War I. For me, that was the best parade ever. It was wonderful to see people grabbing each other, doing little impulsive jigs in the street.

Marching in the parade was the handsomest man I had ever seen, or have seen since: my father in his best Royal South African Navy uniform of a chief petty officer, engine room. My father was a wonderful man in many ways. He was not lettered, but extremely kind and dutiful, and loved for those things — not for being handsome. But I tell you, that day he was handsome.

It was not until 1998 that Tom Brokaw called them “The Greatest Generation,” in a book of that name. Maybe all who go to war are the greatest generation. Maybe, every father who survives is unbearably handsome to someone.

Memorial Day is upon us and our veterans — maybe veterans everywhere — will be briefly remembered. The Greatest Generation was, perhaps, the last time a generation was defined by its sense of duty. That was true of the men and women who peopled my young life.

My father sold our home and few possessions, in what was then Southern Rhodesia, to serve. He was turned down for the British army in Rhodesia because an arm he had once broken had not mended properly. He had heard that the Royal South African Navy would be more tolerant. His acceptance by the navy was not a certainty, and we had no money. But we made the long, hot, six-day journey to South Africa by train to no known future; my father, mother, brother and myself, all going off to war because that is what was done. That is what the men of the Greatest Generation did because it was your duty to serve.

My father was not alone. I grew up hearing other stories of how people had gone to great lengths to serve and, having gotten into the armed services, how they did everything they could to get into the fight, not to serve at a distance in a British dominion, as South Africa then was. That is how South African pilots came to serve in the Battle of Britain.

In those days, patriotism was organic here in the United States and around the globe. Not every last man of military age was a patriot, but most were. It was the deep-seated culture.

When it was over, those who survived WWII were welcomed home with celebrations, appreciation and reverence. Alas the warriors from more recent wars, Korea, Vietnam, Kuwait, Afghanistan, Iraq and lesser conflicts, have come home to cold comfort. No parades, no five-year-olds with flags — and little place in the tapestry of the national memory. No recognition of their inalienable right to honor.

War is not everyone’s business anymore. Vietnam was the first war where patriotism was not part of the equation. Today, with a professional military, it is not the business of the armchair patriots with their slogans, urging others to take up arms.

When the World War II Memorial opened on the Mall in Washington in April 2004, I went there. I did not like it, architecturally; I was disappointed. But then men with canes and in wheelchairs began arriving, smiling and shedding occasional tears. It was important and moving to them, those handsome men. My father would have loved it; now, I like it well. Memorial Day weekend is at hand.

Memories of Baltimore and Another Riot

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I was in Baltimore the last time it burned. That was back in April 1968, after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Washington also burned at that time.

There was something surreal about the mood of the riots in both cities. The anger from African-American rioters seemed to be directed wholly against property.

I walked among the rioters, up 14th Street to the U Street Corridor, the commercial hub of the Shaw area of Washington. Later that day, I drove around Baltimore. They seemed to me to be an uncommonly respectful pair of riots.

In Washington, young African-American men directed me where to go safely; one looter, coming out of a shop on 14th and F Street, asked me if I needed anything, as though he were the proprietor.

Over the decades, I have wondered about those riots. I think they were indeed riots of anger as well as sorrow. King, the great civil rights leader, had been murdered, and already people knew there would not be another like him.

For days I drove around Baltimore, where I lived at the time, and Washington, where troops were patrolling and curfews were in place. With a large “PRESS” sign taped on my car’s windshield, I was allowed to drive around both cities, and I watched them come to grips with reality. A Washington Post writer described how a white motorist and a black motorist had waved each other through an intersection, both feeling they were doing something significant.

But Washington is not Baltimore. And, at that time, Baltimore was as segregated as any Southern city.

The proprietor of a bar near The Baltimore News-American, the Hearst newspaper where I worked, would shoo away blacks with this lie, “This is a private club and I can’t serve you, but I can sell you a bottle to go.”

I wanted to challenge this, and urged a black friend on the newspaper, Lee Lassiter, to come with me and make a stand. He averred, not because he was lacking in courage, but because he was fighting another battle over bars. Lassiter and other activists were trying to restrict the spread of cheap bars in the ghetto, where licenses were indiscriminately issued by a white board to white businessmen.

Unlike Washington which, in some ways, was a more secure community and where there was certain amount of integration, the whites in Baltimore took little interest in the blacks. There was no sense that they shared a city.

Baltimore’s politics were white; its sensibilities were white; and it was comfortably assumed that in the profusion of row houses, there were happy blacks, living a happy parallel life — although that term was not used. Not true then, and not true now.

This is a subjective comment, but I have always felt there is a kind of special dejection in the Baltimore ghetto.

While there was manufacturing, steel and shipbuilding and a car plant in Baltimore, guaranteeing good union jobs, there were pockets of prosperity. As these jobs faded in Baltimore, and other American cities, so did the hope for a route to the middle class for those in the ghetto.

As crime increased everywhere, it surged in Baltimore. Gun ownership shot up, mostly among ghetto youth.

Baltimore’s police – who probably felt the affect in their families, if not in their own aspirations, of the end of industrial prosperity — took out their frustrations on those who had even minor malefactions.

Men in uniform easily degenerate into bullies. I saw this in London. When a policeman and a suspect face off, after the policeman is sure that he is not facing an ambush, he has absolute power over the suspect. It is an intrinsically ugly moment: when the handcuffs click, justice and liberty are at bay. Later in court, or through a civilian review, those things may be re-established. But when the suspect is under lock and key, the police power is absolute — and it is absolutely corrupting.

Police officers go over the line often, and I have seen this all over the world. Race worsens things, but it is not a necessary ingredient.

It is sad for me that, 47 years later, Baltimore should have been torched by a mob. It is sad, too, that things in the row houses of Baltimore are as bad as ever, and that the mob is still the only voice black Baltimoreans think they have.

— For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

 

God Save the Queen. She Is Unique

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She is the best-known woman in the world, and she has been since 1952 when Elizabeth Alexandra Mary Windsor, at age 25, became Queen Elizabeth II. Although she has a huge list of titles, she is to most people simply the queen. And she has been the only British monarch in most people’s lives: She has always seemingly been there.

Once Queen Elizabeth was young and quite pretty; now she is old and quite beloved. She works very hard, whether it is presiding over meetings with prime ministers – she has dealt with 12 of them, starting with Winston Churchill — or applying herself to an endless schedule of charity events. She has visited 116 countries. I have always wondered at her incredible tolerance, no endurance, at watching cultural events in faraway lands: How many children’s choirs, folk dancers or synchronized gymnasts can a human being watch? In the case of the queen, the number seems to have been infinite.

When she came to the throne, she set off a surge of hope in Britain and the Commonwealth. Popular mythology, as I remember, held that a new Queen Elizabeth would bring a revival of fortune for Britain — the second Elizabethan period would be as great as the first Queen Elizabeth’s reign, from 1558 to 1603.

After World War II, Britain was adjusting to a new order in most things, including the social changes introduced by the Labor government immediately after the war, such as national health insurance, and the recognition that Britain was no longer be the preeminent world power, ruling a quarter of the world. The empire was shrinking, and Britain felt exhausted and lessened.

But the new, young queen signaled hope, and the royal family shot to a position of public adulation. I remember covering the wedding of the queen’s sister, Princess Margaret, to the photographer Anthony Armstrong-Jones in 1960, when Britain went was in a kind of royal hysteria. That began to fade as the decade wore on, and that marriage began to creak and eventually dissolve.

As royal scandals multiplied and Britain became a trendsetter in fashion and the arts, Princess Diana, during and after her marriage to Prince Charles, stole much of the queen’s thunder.

The queen said her worst year was 1992, which she famously called an “annus horribilis” in a Nov. 24 speech at Guildhall to mark the 40th anniversary of her accession. Newspapers wondered whether the monarchy was finished and whether it would either give way to a republican Britain or to one where the constitutional monarch was of little importance, as in the Netherlands, Belgium and Spain.

But Queen Elizabeth persevered and, she just turned 89, is more loved than ever. She is slightly old-fashioned, even as Buckingham Palace is anxious to remind us she e-mails and tweets.

She is a fabulous piece of English bric-a-brac in her omnipresent hat and gloves. Though perfectly dressed in her way, she is not a fashion idol. She was a fine horsewoman. She attends cultural events, but seems only to have a passion for horses and dogs. Critics have faulted her for how limited she is in some ways. It may be that at this point, she is as much an anachronism as the monarchy, and there is strength in that.

No longer do comedians make fun of her piping voice and her ability to ride out gaffes, like the time in Canada when she read the wrong speech, having forgotten which city she was visiting. The British might have come to love her for her famously dysfunctional family — even Charles, her quirky son and heir to the throne. Scandals have touched all of her family, excepting herself and her husband Prince Philip, although one of the queen’s ladies-in-waiting told me that he was busy in that circle when he was young.

When she does die, Britain will enter into the most extraordinary period of mourning, followed a year or so later by a coronation. The change will be enormously expensive, from the queen’s burial to the coronation of the king. Tens of thousands of items stamped with ER (Elizabeth Regina) or the queen’s face, including mail boxes, stamps and the 20-pound note, will have to be changed.

Happily and gloriously, after 62 years as queen, Elizabeth is, physically as well as emotionally, part of British life. She is also, in a way, the world’s queen. — For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

There Will Be a Short Delay with the Candidate’s Announcement

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Some of you were expecting me to announce my candidacy for president of the United States, along with the others who got all the headlines.

There have been a few problems. There are solutions, too. (How is that for a campaign zinger?)

There is the problem of my birth. I was, er, born in a foreign country with, er, un-American parents. I have to check with the Ted Cruz camp on that problem.

There is a money problem. At the moment, I have $138 in my current account. But that amount will swell, when my Social Security check comes in next week.

In the long term, I have a crafty, two-pronged approach to raise the billion or so dollars I will need for my campaign. My wife will set up a foundation, called the “Foreign Governments’ Friends Committee,” which will raise money like a Fourth of July flag.

Unlike one of my opponents, I will not beat about the bush on foreign campaign donations. I will take them all, see that they are properly laundered, and promise the donors all sorts of favorable treatment. I can renege later. Not a word, please.

Then there is crowd-sourcing. When my message gets out, I expect a Niagara Falls of money. I will go after the disaffected, unhappy people who hate all candidates. The nutters of the left and the right have lots of dough.

Here is a peek at other aspects of my program:

Bring back manufacturing (back story, by lowering the minimum wage, so that our labor is cheap).

Get tough with Iran. Any Iranian waiter found passing himself off as an Italian at a New York restaurant will get summary deportation.

Give China an ultimatum: Either you double the value of your currency, or millions of Americans will be forbidden to shop at Walmart.

In the Middle East, trust the dictators. We will support the most awful monsters in the time-honored way. If we could get Saddam Hussein out of the grave, I would go for it. Likewise Muammar al-Qaddafi. Call it “the strongman policy”: no messing about with uprisings.

I will be a tough guy supporting other tough guys. I will say to Vladimir Putin, when we are shirtless, “I don’t give a hoot about Ukraine. Take it. But I want you to invade China — just a little way. And crush ISIS. You know, the way you did Czechoslovakia and Hungary in the glory days.

That should take care of the world.

At home I will have the most flexible of policies, based on the latest polling. If you are in favor of abortion, tell Gallup and you will get them.

Want the Ten Commandments on the wall of the Capitol? No problem if you can produce a convincing poll, preferably written on stone tablets.

What is democracy but a craven pursuit of votes through polling? Go democratic all the way, I say.

Wait until you hear some of my appointments. How do you fancy Donald Trump for secretary of state? Here is someone who will appreciate my tough-guys-are-always-right policy.

Before I announce my candidacy, I will perfect my Israel strategy. I am leaning toward giving honorary citizenship to Benjamin Netanyahu, so that I can make him my national security adviser. Why should Congress claim Bibi as their own? I will have goodies to offer him that will beat whatever John Boehner and Mitch McConnell can do. For starters, how about a hard pass to the White House and a regular chance to be on the Sunday talk shows?

Darrell Issa is my choice for ambassador to Libya, in recognition of his Benghazi studies.

Finally, my coup de grace: immigration. Simple, no one will want to live here when I am in the White House. — For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

Nuclear Power under Threat

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On the face of it, the nuclear power industry should be enjoying a boom, reveling in its extraordinary safety record and the fact that it is a carbon-free way to make electricity.

But all is not well in atom land. In fact, things are dismal. Only five nuclear plants are under construction, and they are having birth pains as schedules slip and costs rise.

One plant, Vermont Yankee, has been taken out of service and others are on a watch list. This is happening not because of safety or end-of-life, but because cheap natural gas is undermining the economics of nuclear.

The market has spoken and it has determined that gas is cheaper in the short term, and wind and solar, though limited, enjoy social acceptability and declining costs.

The mighty Exelon Corporation is trying to save three, and maybe more, of its nuclear plants with a political fix; arguing that nuclear is a value proposition – its value to the community will continue long after the gas boom has fizzled. It is an argument that might have been made to save commuter railroads in the heyday of the automobile.

But that is not all that challenges nuclear. Despite its environmental advantages in a time of climate change, the public has been steadily turning against nuclear, persuaded by a relentless campaign that has been waged by opponents like the Union of Concerned Scientists and Natural Resources Defense Council and by Japan’s Fukushima accident following an earthquake and a tsunami. Wrongly, it is believed this resulted in lives lost: Many lives were lost to flooding, but not to radioactivity release.

But the public has absorbed a fear of nuclear, unless it is associated with the Navy. That was reflected this month, when a Gallup poll revealed that only 51 percent now support nuclear, as opposed to a traditional divide of 60 percent for and 40 percent against. It is hopeless to expect a big swing to nuclear with this kind of public reaction. The current slim majority favoring nuclear falls far short of a call for action.

More, the nuclear industry has fair share of bad news of its own which does not help the public love the atom.

The San Onofre plant in California was closed down because new steam generators were defective, and the owners decided it was not worth the hundreds of millions it would cost to fix things. Cost overruns and delays, once blamed on environmental opposition, now are almost always a result of problems in the construction.

Much hope has rested on two new reactors being built by the Southern Company in Georgia. Known as Plant Vogtle Units 3 and 4, there are delays and cost overruns and the utility is in court with the prime contractor, the eponymous Westinghouse Electric Company. Although the Southern Company is determined to complete the reactors and under its feisty chairman, Tom Fanning, possibly to build more, the costs are rising.

Just a few months ago, there was hope that new reactors — smaller, mass-produced power plants — were in the pipeline. But now the industry is convinced the next reactor design will have to be developed outside of the United States; probably in Asia, where both China and India are working on radical new reactors, far from today’s light water plants — 100 of them — operating in the United States.

The U.S. challenge is not science or engineering – we have designs aplenty and great nuclear science – but regulation. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) – which protects public health and safety — is not equipped to license a new reactor, and it is believed that a new reactor type would have to spawn a whole new regulatory bureaucracy. One aspirant with a new nuclear design says ruefully, “It’s as though the FAA had recertified every aspect of flying when the jet engine came along.”

The NRC, even its staff admits, is slow and ponderous. What they don’t admit is that the commission is not only protecting the public, by making sure that today’s reactors are safe, but it’s also preventing the public from having better nuclear power in the future.

For the industry the problem is not only the time it would take to bring a new reactor through licensing, but also the cost. The applicant, not the government, pays for the NRC to license a reactor. Some say that cost could run towards a billion dollars.

Considering this situation, U.S. leadership in reactor technology is doomed. — For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

Birth of an Institution in Boston

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Do think tanks really think? It’s not that these organizations — mostly centered in Washington, D.C., but also scattered across the country – don’t harbor some fine minds among their scholars and fellows, but the problem is we know what they think — and have often known for a long time. The rest is articulation.

Among Washington think tanks, we know what to expect from the Brookings Institution: earnest, slightly left-of-center analysis of major issues. Likewise, we know that the Center for Strategic and International Studies will do the same job with a right-of-center shading, and a greater emphasis on defense and geopolitics.

What the tanks provide is support for political and policy views; detailed argument in favor of a known point of view. By and large, the verdict is in before the trial has begun.

There a few exceptions, house contrarians. The most notable is Norman Ornstein, who goes his own way at the conservative American Enterprise Institute (AEI). Ornstein, hugely respected as an analyst and historian of Congress, often expresses opinions in articles and books which seem to be wildly at odds with the orthodoxy of AEI.

A less-celebrated role of the thinks tanks is as resting places for the political elite when their party is out of power. Former U.N. ambassador John Bolton, rumored to be favored as a future Republican secretary of state, is hosted at AEI. National Security Adviser Susan Rice was comfortable at Brookings between service in the Clinton and he Obama administrations. At any time, dozens of possible office holders reside at the Washington think tanks, building reputations and waiting.

My interest in think tanks and their thinkers has led me to what might be developing into a think tank, although it’s too early to say. It’s so early that it has no headquarters, secretariat or paid staff. But this nascent think tank has gathered a loose faculty from a coterie of public intellectuals, mainly in and around Boston, and abroad in Hanoi, Tokyo and Berlin.

It’s called the Boston Global Forum. Formed in 2012, it’s led by two very different but, apparently, compatible men: Michael Dukakis, former Massachusetts governor and Democratic presidential nominee, and Nguyen Anh Tuan, who founded a successful internet company in Vietnam and now lives in Boston.

The concept of the forum is to study and discuss a single topic for a year. Last year, in forums and internet hookups between Boston and Asian and European cities, the topic was security in the South and East China seas, where war could easily erupt over territorial disputes. After a year of discussion, the participants concluded that a framework for peace in the region needs to be established and that current international arrangements and organizations don’t go far enough in that direction. This year’s topic is cybersecurity.

The Boston Global Forum has strong ties to the faculties at Harvard and Northeastern University, where Dukakis is a professor. Most forum meetings take place on the Harvard campus. Two of the forum’s most conspicuous champions are Harvard professors Joseph Nye and Tom Patterson. Patterson’s office at the John F. Kennedy School of Government serves as a kind of de facto headquarters.

This new entrant into the think tank cohort is very East Coast-tony, and very energetic. This year it has plans for meetings in Vietnam, Tokyo and somewhere in Europe, and has attracted media heavyweights like David Sanger of The New York Times and Charles Sennott, one of the founders of the online GlobalPost.

As the Boston Global Forum is a new think tank, questions abound: Will it get funding? Will it find premises and staff ? Will it get public recognition?

The big question about anything that looks like a think tank is, will thinking happen there? Will the Boston Global Forum be a crucible for big ideas? Or will it, like other think tanks, develop its own binding ideology?

Will the Boston Global Forum become, like so many, a smooth propaganda machine? Or will it be a place where the outlandish can live with the orthodox?  — For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate