On the face of it, there isn’t much to celebrate on April 22, the 50th anniversary of Earth Day. The oceans are choked with invisible carbon and plastic, which is very visible when it washes up on beaches and fatal when ingested by animals, from whales to seagulls.

On land, as a run-up to Earth Day, Mississippi recorded its widest tornado — two miles across — since measurements were first taken, and the European Copernicus Institute said an enormous hole in the ozone over the Arctic has opened after a decade of stability.

But perversely, there’s some exceptionally good news. Because of the cessation of so much activity, due to the coronavirus pandemic, the air has cleared dramatically; cities around the world, including Mumbai and Los Angeles, are smog-free. Also, the murk in the waters of Venice’s canals and the waves from motorboats are gone, revealing fish and plants in the clear Adriatic water.

Jan Vrins, global energy leader at Guidehouse, the world-circling consultancy, was so excited by the clearing that he posted and tweeted a picture taken from a town in the Punjab where Himalayan peaks are visible for the first time in 30 years.

The message here is very hopeful: With some moderation in human activity, we can save the environment and ourselves.

The sense of gloom and hopelessness that has attended a litany of environmental woes needn’t be inevitable. Mitigating conduct in industry and, particularly in the energy sector, can have huge effect quickly; transportation will take longer. Vrins says the electric utility industry — a source of so much carbon — is now almost entirely engaged in the fight against global warming. Just five years ago, he says, they weren’t all fully committed to it.

Another Guidehouse consultant, Matthew Banks, is working with large industrial and consumer companies on reducing the effect of packaging as well as the energy content of consumer goods. Among his clients are Coca-Cola, McDonald’s and Johnson & Johnson. The latter, he says, has been working to reduce product footprint since 1995.

“This is an important moment in time,” Banks says. “Folks have talked about this as being The Great Pause, and I think on this Earth Day we need to think about how that bounce back or rebound from the Great Pause can be done in a way that responds to the climate crisis.”

I was on hand covering the first Earth Day, created by Wisconsin senator Gaylord Nelson and its national organizer, Denis Hayes. It came as a follow-on to the environmental conscientiousness that arose from the publication of Rachel Carson’s seminal book “Silent Spring” in 1962. That dealt with the devastating effect of the insecticide DDT.

Richard Nixon gave the environmental movement the hugely important National Environmental Policy Act of 1969. With that legislation, and the support of people like Nelson, the environmental movement was off and running — and sadly, sometimes running off the rails.

One of the environmentalists’ targets was nuclear power. If nuclear was bad, then something else had to be good. At that time, wind turbines — like those we see everywhere nowadays — hadn’t been perfected. Early solar power was to be produced with mirrors concentrating sunlight on towers. That concept has had to be largely abandoned as solar-electric cells have improved and the cost has skidded down.

But in the 1970s, there was reliable coal, lots of it. As the founder and editor in chief of The Energy Daily, I sat through many a meeting where environmentalists proposed that coal burned in fluidized-bed boilers should provide future electricity.

Natural gas and oil were regarded as, according to the inchoate Department of Energy, depleted resources. Coal was the future, especially after the energy crisis broke with the Arab oil embargo in the fall of 1973.

Now there is a new sophistication. It was growing before the coronavirus pandemic laid the world low, but it has gained in strength. As Guidehouse’s Vrins says, “We still have climate change as a ‘gray rhino’, a big threat to our society and the world at large. I hope that utilities and all their stakeholders will increase their urgency of addressing that big threat which is still ahead of us.”

Happy birthday Earth Day — and many more to come.

 

 

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Photo: President Richard Nixon and First Lady Pat Nixon plant a tree on the White House South Lawn to recognize the first Earth Day.

I’m just old enough to remember Victory in Europe Day (May 8, 1945), formally recognizing the end of World War II in Europe. My family was in Cape Town: My father served in the Royal South African Navy, then under the command of the Royal Navy.

The jubilation was intense; nothing I’ve seen has touched it in its unrestricted joy. Strangers really did hug and kiss each other. I was hugged and kissed as though I’d personally borne the battle as a toddler.

Apart from joy and relief, the end of war in the Free World had another consequence: It liberated people from class and economic structures that had inhibited creativity.

Under the pre-war rigidities, those lower in the social system didn’t have the temerity or the opportunity to add to the innovation that created the peace prosperity that marked the 1950s.

The working class — now regarded as being part of the middle class — had been thought as destined to a lesser social standing; certainly not expected to invent, create and go into business. After the war, more things were possible.

Innovation was for everyone and it showed in everything, from the building of Levittown on New York’s Long Island and its descendants, to the civilian uses of nuclear power, the arrival of FM radio and color television, revolving credit and, oh, the miniskirt.

In the last 30 years the universal nature of innovation has come to mean advances, incredible advances, in computing and industries transformed by computing — take public transportation and scooters and ride-sharing.

The creation of wealth through innovation has been largely in the province of computing. But in the last several decades it was the innovation of bringing Greek yogurt to the United States that led to a billion-dollar fortune.

When the scourge of COVID-19 has passed, the nation will be a different place, changed dramatically from the way it was. It won’t have — to use the business school analogy — a classic V-curve recovery where things bounce back to where they’d been before.

Many weak industries will be severely contracted, including movie theaters, retailers, restaurants, and small colleges and universities. This will throw a great deal of talent out of work. Those are the people, I believe, who will create a new innovative wave in society and bring about a new prosperity, after some very hard times.

The internet provides new entrepreneurs an opportunity to draw attention to products and services that would have faced a marketing roadblock in another generation.

Big industry, too, will innovate, not the least to shore up its defenses against another national crisis.

The electric utilities, which have been on the front line of the essential services during the COVID-19 horror, will be seeking to further harden their systems against disruptions from cyberattack, physical attack or other failure, which could produce a huge crisis.

Already, Michelle Fay of the forward-looking consulting firm Guidehouse is looking to this innovative future to strengthen the electric industry. She says, “Innovation will emerge as an even bigger opportunity as we look to improve the resiliency of the critical infrastructure and further enhance our ability to provide business continuity in times like this.”

Michael Short, associate professor of nuclear science and engineering at MIT, points out an accompanying development. He says on a recent edition of my television program, “White House Chronicle,” the current crisis looks as though it’ll bring back respect for expertise.

It seems to me that this disrespect has been prevalent since the 1960s, when so many of our social troubles — environment, civil rights, women’s rights and the Vietnam War — were laid at the feet of experts and the institutions that employed them.

The crisis has shown that hearsay medicine and what I call “voodoo science” won’t help in a crunch. Solid science and good medicine are the only way.

Now I’m seeing the shoots of new businesses sprouting, from people making jewelry at home to sell on Etsy to grocery delivery services. Expect a surge of books and plays. Crisis produces new product, creates new business, causes new thinking.

My friend Morgan O’Brien, who is well-credentialed in innovation as the co-founder of Nextel and now at the helm of Anterix, a critical communications network provider, says innovation doesn’t come easy.

“The inertia that pulls all human efforts earthward, and the pain of looking past the ‘very difficult’ to spy the ‘barely possible’; these are the obstacles to bringing innovation into the world, bloody and bruised, only to be immediately beset by doubts and fears,” he says.

Innovation is coming on a grand scale, some of it as complex as  O’Brien’s vision for cell phones or as simple as, my favorite, wheels on luggage. Get ready.

There are lessons to be learned in the COVID-19 crisis from the energy crisis, which broke in the winter of 1973 and extended into the early 1980s. Projections were dire. At a session of the Aspen Institute’s energy section one year, we looked at how the country could deal with an economic downturn to a negative growth rate of 23 percent. Aspen may want to look at that again.

In Washington, first under President Richard Nixon, then under presidents Gerald Ford and finally under Jimmy Carter, there was what might be called mobilization. It had two aspects: one was intellectual and the other was scientific. The brainy one was centered in the Federal Energy Office which attracted some extraordinarily gifted economists, geologists and managers. The rest of the government, from the Interior Department to the State Department, was also in the game.

Particularly there was mobilization of the system of national laboratories where, to my mind, the scientific muscle of the country could be found then and now. They had been primarily nuclear labs, led by the three big players in the atomic arsenal: Los Alamos, Lawrence Livermore and Sandia.

Everything was tried and not everything worked. Who remembers in situ coal gasification, ocean thermal gradients, magnetohydrodynamics, hot rocks, low-head hydro or wave power?

In the mix were solar, wind and efforts to loosen oil in tight formations. These were the winners, but it was not clear at all then.

Gifted leadership emerged first at the Federal Energy Office, then at the successor to the Atomic Energy Commission, the Energy Research and Development Administration. Under Carter, all the energy agencies were rolled into the Department of Energy with its first secretary, a star in the Washington firmament, James Schlesinger.

That kind of mobilization is needed now, talent plus science.

The national labs, 17 strong, have some biological capability —  several having had some role in the Human Genome Project, and others looking at the treatment of cancer with radiation.

The COVID-19 virus will not be defeated just by medical science but by the whole panoply of science, including what might at first sound like kooky ideas. I recall the derision that greeted solar and wind concepts back in 1974. Now they are mother’s milk in the energy mix.

One of the highest challenges facing hospitals and medical facilities is to save the lives of their staff with superior sanitation of protective gear like respirators, the now well-known N95 masks and the ambient air itself.

I was excited to learn about a McLean, Va.-based company, airPHX, which has an off-the-shelf, air-scrubbing system using a cold plasma as the scrubbing agent. The units are about the size of a computer and each unit – they operate continuously from a three-prong plug — will clean the air of a 15,000-square-foot room, according to the company’s CEO William Pommerening.

The airPHX units, which were developed to combat mold, odors and pathogens in gyms and elsewhere, are in production on a modest scale, but this is set to ramp up with a new contract manufacturer in Tennessee.

Pommerening told me that he believes his machines will effectively destroy the COVID-19 virus both in the air and on surfaces. He said, “We have lab testing showing efficacy on over 30 health care-associated pathogens including bacteria, viruses and mold showing a 4 log [a technical measure in sanitation which equates to 99.99 percent effectiveness] reduction, or greater, in surface organisms in 30 minutes.” This, he said, included testing on a sister virus to COVID-19. For the air, the effectiveness was between 92 percent and 96 percent, he said. New masks are rated at 95 percent, hence their N95 designation.

If this proves out, it will be a boon across the spectrum of indoor trouble spots and will one day have a wide application in workplaces and recreation areas.

In my view, it needs government scientific review to confirm the data. But it is as promising as anything I have heard of, including hydrogen peroxide and ultraviolet light.

The need to be sure is paramount.

Nothing will be the same again.

Those are words that challenge the heart and the imagination. The heart because, as in a death or the loss of a job, some things will be very missed. The imagination because it needs inspired speculation to know how the present crisis will reshape the way we live; how we are governed, how we educate, how we do business, and how we play.

Some losses are somewhat predictable. Most of us may never sit in a movie theater again because there may be no movie theaters. They were already having a hard time with the competition from streaming services, now many may just not reopen.

Question: What will be done with those buildings? They are mostly part of shopping centers where many of the tenants for restaurants and specialty shops will also go out of business.

Here’s my answer: In that glorious time when we have licked COVID-19, many new entrepreneurs will get their start in those empty shells. A myriad of yet-unknown businesses will crop up, coming out of these times of ultra-difficulty. Failing shopping centers offer habitat to startups.

We are in a state of war, and in war — despite its horror — there is invention. As we try to defeat this pandemic, there will be inventions aplenty.

War has always spurred creativity, in art and in science, and in its aftermath, a time of optimism and opportunity. Catastrophe shakes up society and reorients it. There is a high price but a great reward.

Needs must, there will be a re-evaluation of values and the goods and services that are essential. High on that list will be electricity. Over and over again we will be asking ourselves if the electric grid is safe and if so, how safe?

As Morgan O’Brien, co-founder of Nextel and now CEO of Anterix, which offers utilities secure communications systems, told me, “The coronavirus pandemic is putting more stress on the infrastructure which keeps our society functioning. Critical infrastructure like the electric grid will be more stressed as it is the essential lifeline for Americans sheltering in place.”

A loss of all or part of the grid is an existential fear that has had experts worried since the first computer hackers had a go at it. Utility presidents have told me that it is grid security that keeps them awake at night. It should. CPS Energy, the utility in San Antonio, gets more than 2 million hits a day, I believe.

Late last year the president’s National Infrastructure Advisory Council warned strongly of the dangers of cyberattack. It said the electric utility industry is good at tackling small, short-term outages but it is essentially unprepared for catastrophic outages lasting a long time.

Earlier this year James Woolsey, a former CIA director and an honorary co-chair of the Secure the Grid Coalition, wrote to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission demanding it order more physical security for transformers, pylons, etc.

Woolsey cited a lack of improved physical security since that became an issue with the sophisticated disabling of Pacific Gas & Electric’s substation in Metcalf, Calif., in 2013.

John Savage, professor emeritus of computer science at Brown University, who is writing a book on cybersecurity, raises a less-mentioned dimension of threat to the grid: the role of GPS. With the advent of global positioning satellites, he explained, the utility industry switched from using atomic clocks to using GPS timing as the basis for its nationwide synchronization.

Savage told me, “Dependence on GPS for timing is a security risk. If GPS timing signals are distorted or lost, serious damage may be done to the grid.

“GPS signals can be lost due to a local jamming, blackouts, produced by a solar flare, or spoofing. A GPS anomaly alone or a cyberattack combined with one can cascade and bring down a large portion of the grid for an extended period of time.”

Gen. James Jones, a retired Marine commandant and NATO commander, told me, “For the past several years, I have been preoccupied by the proximity of threats, particularly in the cyber realm.”

Much will change, but the need for reliable electricity will remain paramount.

There is plenty of time in Botswana. I mention this because suddenly many people around the world are finding time hanging heavily as the coronavirus rages.

But there are cultures where time is part of the ethos, where filling it is an art. For example, look to shepherds in the Middle East, building complex cairns out of loose stones to fill in time. Look to parts of the world where people sit together in companionship but not conversing. You see it in the Middle East and Africa.

For most of the 1970s my father lived in Botswana. He loved the country; and from what I could see on annual visits, the country loved him. He was one of a small population of expats in the capital Gaborone. He had gone there from neighboring Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) to work at his trade as a mechanic.

When he grew too old to handle the demands of the work, he switched to teaching simple mechanics at the local high school. These consisted of things like why a hammer needs to be balanced, the difference between British and American threads on bolts and how to ground an electrical installation.

One day he, a mild man, told a student that he needed to do something a bit quicker. The student, one of his favorites, replied, “Rra [Sir], you have no time. There is no time in Rhodesia where you come from, there is no time in England, and there is no time at all in America. But in Botswana, there is plenty of time.”

Indeed, there was — and I am sure there still is plenty of time in Botswana.

Activities had to be crafted to take time.

One morning Dad told me he had to make a telephone call to his friend Peter Robbertse. “Good,” I said, expecting him to go to the phone across the room. Instead, he suggested yet another cup of tea, a staple of life among Brits in Africa.

Breakfast followed with more mentions of the need to make the phone call. So it went, “I must call Peter” and no call made.

Finally, just before 8 p.m., he picked up the phone and talked to his friend. After hanging up, he said, “There. That is something accomplished.”

Social visits were about the same.

We would go to “tea” — with cake and bread and butter. The town baker was skillful, and the cake was good. But, oh, the conversation.

At that time, there was no newspaper, no radio and no television in Botswana, so news was by word of mouth. As there was sunshine every day, there was not even the weather as a topic of conversation.

Our conversation went like this, “Jim got a new tire for his truck.”

“Yes, I heard it came on the train from South Africa. Only took about a month. Not bad.”

Long silence. Maybe some desultory remark like, “He needed it: The old one was always losing air.”

It would go on like that for an hour and a half or longer — people having nothing to say and yet enjoying each other in silence.

At the end of one such tea, my father got up, we said our thanks and farewells and went back to his cinderblock flat. He said something like, “I really enjoy these get togethers. Good to hear what is going on.”

I held my tongue, not mentioning that I had had better conversations alone in the bath.

No one ever said they were bored. Neither, noticeably, were they interested in the outside world.

Perhaps that might have upset them. I was not asked to hold forth on my racy life in Washington. Knowledge of the bigger world would not have sat well: It might have drawn attention to what their lives lacked and to the silence.

Fast forward to 1998. I am back in Botswana, sitting in the beer garden of the spanking new Holiday Inn in Gaborone. Things have sped up for Gabarone since its designation as the capital in 1966, when it was more of a village.

I am there this time covering President Bill Clinton’s Africa tour. I and four other reporters order lunch: hamburgers for all. But the waiter, instead of taking our order to the cook manning the grill, went to talk to other waiters.

Time went by. An irritated guy from a network said, “What is she doing? She has not put our order in.”

I explained, “She thinks we will want to be here for a very long time. This is a nice place to pass time in her view. She is being considerate. In Botswana there is plenty of time.”

I went to tell her that we were Americans and had no time. She understood.

For more than a decade, I’ve been writing about the isolated, the lonely, the abandoned: Those who feel that the world has no place for them.

Now all of us will know something of their isolation and, in the case of people who live on their own, loneliness.

Those I’ve been writing about are the luckless hundreds of thousands in the United States — millions around world — who suffer from Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, now known as Myalgic Encephalomyelitis. They are sentenced to live separately by their illness and its debilitating fatigue. They are a kind of living dead. Now I have a glimmer, no more to be sure, of how it must be every day for these sufferers.

What will it be like for the rest of us in two weeks when we’ve exhausted the pleasures of home life and yearn to see our friends, go to a restaurant, a play or a concert? Just to live normally?

I’ve always tried to console myself with what I call “adventure therapy.” Like most pop psychology it isn’t very profound, but it does help. Will it help now? I have no idea.

Anyway, the therapy is that you try to find the adventure in any situation you’re in, which can include some hairy ones, like facing surgery. (Who will you meet? What’s all the equipment? How will they perform the surgery? Do the doctors like doctoring? What kind of life do the nurses live?)

In my own home — mercifully which I share with my ever-cheerful wife — I wonder where the adventure lies in this crisis.

First, I know I won’t write the Great American Novel or any work of fiction. I won’t write my life story, as I’m constantly advised to do. My ego is robust, but I’m not sure it’s robust enough for that.

Oscar Wilde worried about “third-rate litterateurs” picking over the lives of dead writers. Of course, it seems to me some lives are lived with an eye to posterity.

I’m always amazed at people who in the middle of great trauma or great events have time to sit down and write what they think and feel. I’m glad they do, but I don’t think we’re entitled. The world loves Shakespeare’s works and knows nothing much about him.

We know too much about people of minor achievement whom we call celebrities. We watch them and their petty lives with the attention of a fakir watching his snake. Yeah, I’m no better. I want to know what’s to become of Meghan and Harry, where will Lindsay Lohan settle and, only somewhat less trivially, what are the late-night comedians doing with their spare time now that we learn that they need huge staffs to be funny?

I do think we need a record of our times, often informed by memoirs.

Unfortunately, and inexcusably, when the Trump era is behind us, we’ll know too little about what went on in the inner councils of the White House. President Trump has shown near contempt for the Presidential Records Act, inspired by the fall of President Richard Nixon. Trump writes little and destroys much that it written, we’re told.

One has always dreamed of a time when there was enough leisure to read, maybe plow through Tolstoy, give Proust another go, or try to understand Chinese literature. But I think that won’t happen. I’ll read the same kind of books I always read: biographies and crime stories. Most likely I’ll read a bit more, curse television a bit more, and squander my time watching and reading the news about COVID-19.

As I struggle to avoid the temptations of the refrigerator and that reproving word processor (It whispers, “Write a book.”), I’ll wonder about those who existed before this pandemic in a long, dark tunnel of isolation without hope of light at the end: Those who can hardly hope to break out one day into what Winston Churchill called the “sunlit uplands.”

A dark cloud is passing across the nation and the world. When it passes, how will we have changed? How will we react after this national jolt?

In Britain after World War II, there was a period, at the end of the 1940s and into the 1950s, of idealism and common purpose. It ushered in as its prime minister not Winston Churchill, who had won the war, but milquetoast Clement Atlee. One lasting and revered reform of the Atlee government was the introduction of the National Health Service.

In America there was a new confidence, aided by legislation like the GI Bill, which led to the expansion and general contentment of the 1950s.

The tumultuous, jolting 1960s left us changed. Sex was considered an entitlement, the environment an ethic, civil rights a moral obligation, and women gained nominal equality. Reverence for institutions was out and all expertise was suspect. “Some things are too important to be left to the experts,” said the young people who had hated the Vietnam War.

In the 1970s, the revolutionaries of the 1960s were gradually absorbed into the bourgeoisie. Mostly, they seemed slightly embarrassed about who they had been and what they had done.

The killing of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968 and the riots that followed, engulfing major cities from Baltimore to Los Angeles, looked momentarily like a national wake-up call that would unite the nation. Instead, we got a measurable jolt with white flight to the suburbs.

The energy crisis of 1973, which remained with us for two decades, also jolted the American body politic. Here was an external force that could not be internalized: The oil we needed could not be produced domestically. We were at the mercy of foreign powers, like Saudi Arabia and Iran. All the raw materials we had needed up that point appeared to be domestic. Now we had joined the world community in a way frightening to us. Fortress America was breached.

We thought that crisis would change the way we lived. Amitai Etzioni, then a professor at Columbia, and a Wall Street Journal columnist, predicted that we would all have less of everything – and be just as happy, if not happier. We would all wear jeans as daily dress, ride bicycles and drive very small cars. Detroit-made some small cars  — and they were awful. But the move to smaller cars — no more land yachts with acres of chrome and fins — can be seen on the streets today. Something seminal had jolted us and spurred our engineers to do better.

Another jolt was 9/11: an attack of wartime proportions. It fed a new nationalism, an inward turn, with a profound distrust, even dislike for people of different cultures who want to come here from elsewhere. It stirred a somnolent patriotism.

Now, in the time of COVID-19, we are enduring another great national jolt which will have consequences in the decades ahead.

After this pandemic, it is a fair guess, we will be more inclined to believe the experts and to value medical science the same way we have worshiped computer technology. In addition, stock markets might come to be eclipsed by a more representative measure of the national well-being.

Particularly, the indifference we have felt to predictions of existential calamity may be taken way more seriously than before COVID-19. Predictions of disasters that did not happen, like the Y2K computer alarm, have lulled us into thinking bad things will not really happen: A fix would be found.

Now we are struggling with an assault that will be seminal in its impact, personally frightening and economically devastating. We cannot buy or fight our way out of the COVID-19 pandemic. An immunization is a year and half away. Will it work?

I would put at the top our list of existential threats climate change and cyberattack. Sea levels are rising, and coastal cities are under pressure. That will get worse. The security of the electric grid also is under a daily attack. Experts are and have been warning of the possibility of parts of the country being blacked out for long periods. A new bipartisan congressional cyberattack threat report has just been released.

Going forward, we dare not think it cannot happen here because it can. It is happening here now.

“ … until every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another drawn with the sword…” — President Abraham Lincoln, second inaugural address

 

Often when there is an intimidating mountain of books, one needs something else: another book. One such book was Martin Gilbert’s “In Search of Churchill: A Historian’s Journey,” published in 1994.

Gilbert, author of Churchill’s eight-volume, official biography, must have felt that a smaller book was needed as a guide. Or, more likely, he realized that big works on his subject abounded, so he wrote an informal book about how he wrote the official biography. It is a quick guide to the man Churchill, his habits and eccentricities.

Now comes an important book that, I think, will be invaluable for people who are overwhelmed by the 15,000-plus books on President Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War: “Every Drop of Blood: The Momentous Second Inauguration of Abraham Lincoln” by Edward Achorn. It is a small masterpiece, brilliant in concept and exquisite in execution.

Achorn has taken just one day, March 4, 1865, the day of Lincoln’s second inauguration, as the keyhole through which he gives us a 360-degree view of the Civil War: the players, the issues, the bloodshed, the misery, the sacrifice — and the folly, nobility and the cruelty of the war.

By that March, when Lincoln had been re-elected, the war was drawing to a close. It had claimed an incredible 700,000 lives, left families shattered, and the South in ruins.

At the center of it all was Lincoln, the gangling, ruminating, rube-like figure who wrote with biblical grandeur. Though torn by the war, he ordered that the Confederacy be crushed by whatever means to bring the war to an end — an idea that Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman’s men executed with sometimes barbaric zeal, especially in South Carolina and Georgia.

For me, the sorry plight of the prisoners of war is especially hard to take. On both sides, they suffered and died in degradation of disease and starvation. Yet Lincoln stopped the prisoner exchanges for two and a half years, adding to the death and misery on both sides.

The author — a deft hand at scenes and people — paints a vivid picture of the Washington of 1865, from a society party thrown by the rich Chief Justice Salmon Chase and his beautiful daughter, Kate Chase Sprague, which lacked nothing in sumptuousness, to the romance between Lincoln’s assassin, John Wilkes Booth, and Lucy Lambert Hale, the daughter of Lincoln’s ally and confidant New Hampshire Sen. John Parker Hale.

Achorn tells us of the mud that oozed and sloshed everywhere for the inaugural, as it had rained hard that day and the previous one. He details the permanent stench that came from the Washington City Canal, near Capitol Hill, which was failing as a commercial waterway. The canal was filled with human and animal feces, dead animals and other detritus of the city.

He also tells us of the social life, where young people met each other at fashionable tea dances at the National Hotel.

All this while the wounded lay in terrible pain in inadequate hospitals. This suffering recorded by the poet and reporter Walt Whitman, who went daily to comfort the hurting soldiers, and the pioneering nurse Clara Barton, who sought to talk to Lincoln about the missing.

Washington was a cauldron of a place that year. A place of hopeful African-Americans, freed from slavery but owning nothing, as well as profiteers, social climbers and office seekers, deserters and those who had fought and had been wounded.

There were those aplenty who hated Lincoln with passion and thought a second term would destroy the country. At the Capitol on that day of inauguration, when Lincoln delivered one the great pieces of American oratory, just 701 words long, there were admirers, like another great orator of the time, the freed slave Frederick Douglass, and haters who wanted him dead, including Booth, who had originally hoped to kill Lincoln during the ceremony.

Achorn is journalist, and he uses the skills of his trade to bring us as much of the flavor from contemporary accounts as he can find in letters and newspapers without, as academics often do, weighing down the narrative with whole letters and articles. This is a book that moves on efficiently, parading its characters, from politicians and newspaper editors to actors and prostitutes (a Booth weakness).

With skill and massive research, Achorn brings it all into one place on one day for us to see, feel and ponder.

A “scram” is the emergency shutdown of a nuclear power plant. Control rods, usually boron, are dropped into the reactor and these absorb the neutron flux and shut it down.

President Trump, a supporter of nuclear power, has in a few words scrammed the whole nuclear industry, or at least dealt its orderly operation a severe blow.

Scientists see nuclear waste as a de minimus problem. Nuclear power opponents — who really can’t be called environmentalists anymore — see it as a club with which to beat nuclear and stop its development.

The feeling that nuclear waste is an insoluble problem has seeped into the public consciousness. People, who otherwise would be nuclear supporters, ask, “Ah, but what about the waste?”

For its part, the nuclear industry has looked to the government to honor its promise to take care of the waste, which it made at the beginning of the nuclear age.

In the early days of civilian nuclear power — with the startup of the Shippingport Atomic Power Station in Pennsylvania in 1957 — the presiding theory was that waste wasn’t a problem: It would be put somewhere safe, and that would be that.

Civilian waste would be reprocessed, recovering useful material like uranium and isolating waste products, which would need special storage. The most worrisome nuclear byproducts are gamma, beta and X-ray emitters, which decay in about 300 years.

The long-lived alpha emitters, principally plutonium, must be put somewhere safe for all time. Plutonium has a half-life of 240,000 years. It’s pretty benign except that it’s an important component of nuclear weapons.

If you get it in your lungs, you’ll almost certainly get lung cancer. Otherwise, people have swallowed it and injected it without harm. It can be shielded with a piece of paper. I have handled it in a glovebox with gloves that weren’t so different from household rubber ones.

But it’s plutonium that gives the “eternal” label to nuclear waste.

Enter President Jimmy Carter in 1977. He believed that reprocessing nuclear waste — as they do in France, Russia, Japan and other countries — would lead to nuclear proliferation. Just months in office, Carter banned reprocessing: the logical step to separating the cream from the milk in nuclear waste handling.

Since then, it’s been the policy of succeeding administrations that the whole, massive nuclear core should be buried. The chosen site for that burial was Yucca Mountain in Nevada. Some $15 billion to $18 billion has been spent readying the site with its tunnels, rail lines, monitors and passive ventilation.

In 2010 Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.) — then the majority leader in the Senate — said no to Yucca Mountain. It’s generally believed that Reid was bowing to casino interests in Las Vegas, which thought this was the wrong kind of gamble.

The industry had pinned all its hopes on Yucca Mountain being revived under Trump: He had promised it would be. Then on Feb. 6, and with an eye to the election (he failed to carry Nevada in 2016), Trump tweeted, “Nevada, I hear you and my administration will RESPECT you!”

In the Department of Energy, which was promoting Yucca Mountain, gears are crashing, rationales are being torn up and new ones thought up, even as the nuclear waste continues to pile up at operating reactors. No one has any idea what comes next.

Time, I think — after watching nuclear waste shenanigans since 1969 — to take a very fresh look at nuclear waste disposal. Most likely, a first step would be to restart reprocessing to reduce the volume.

I’ve been advocating that to leave the past behind, a prize, like the XPRIZE — maybe one awarded by the XPRIZE Foundation — should be established for new ideas on managing nuclear waste. The prize must be substantial: not less than $20 million. It could be financed by companies like Google or Microsoft, which have lots of money, and a declared interest in clean air and decarbonization.

The old concepts have been so tinkered with and politicized that nuclear waste is now a political horror story. Make what you will of Trump being on the same side of nuclear waste management as presidents Carter and Barack Obama.