White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

Obama Scuttles Another Nuclear Waste Solution

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Naked goes the president to the Netherlands.
 
President Obama plans to attend the Nuclear Security Summit in The Hague on March 24-25. He has long professed a keen interest in reducing the threat from nuclear weapons. In 2009, in his notable Prague speech, Obama declared, “The existence of thousands of nuclear weapons is the most dangerous legacy of the cold war.” He vowed “concrete steps towards a world without nuclear weapons.”
 
Rhetorically, at least, Obama has stayed the course. But some of his actions suggest that, in reality, he is very prepared to alter course for political and budgetary reasons.
 
One of his first actions as president was to start the abandonment of the Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste Repository in Nevada, in a political nod to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.).
 
But spent fuel from civilian power reactors does not pose as great a threat of proliferation as plutonium, the man-made fissile metal that is at the heart of a modern thermonuclear weapon. And it is plutonium that worries experts like former Sen. Sam Nunn (D-Ga.), who heads the Nuclear Threat Initiative.
 
Plutonium is basically forever: it has a half life of 24,100 years. There is a terrifying amount of it in the world, mostly the result of decommissioning warheads. Some of it is stored; some is still in warheads waiting to be decommissioned.
 
The United States and Russia have been working on that problem, in what has been a successful collaboration. Under a treaty signed in 2000, and amended in 2010, the United States and Russia have agreed to get rid of 34 metric tons each of plutonium that has come from a reduction in weapons stockpiles.
 
The United States agreed to do this mostly by burning it as fuel in civilian power reactors, something the French already do. This fuel, known as mixed oxide, or MOX, blends plutonium with uranium to make new fuel for the reactors. The Russians are developing fast neutron reactors to burn up their plutonium.
 
To keep our part of the bargain, a fuel fabrication facility is under construction at the government's Savannah River Site, near Aiken, S.C. As buildings go, it is a marvel, with concrete walls 5-feet-thick and huge quantities ultra-high-quality steel, welded with the greatest precision. The whole structure could last for thousands of years – just remember that Coliseum in Rome was made of concrete 2,000 years ago.
 
But the project — which has more than 4,000 suppliers in 43 states and 1,800 directly employed workers — is suddenly being put on “cold standby,” a euphemism for abandoned. The explanation from the U.S. Department of Energy is that the project is costing too much.
 
South Carolina is suing the U.S. Department of Energy, claiming the shutdown is unconstitutional because money authorized and appropriated for construction this year will be used to terminate the project. The facility is 60-percent complete and $4.5 billion has been spent; it is estimated that shutdown will cost a further $1 billion.
 
Seven senators — including Mary Landrieu (D-La.), chair of the Senate Energy Committee, and Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) — have protested the abrupt and unexpected change of policy on plutonium disposal.
 
In the early days of Obama's first term, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs told me that the administration was shutting down the Yucca Mountain site for “scientific reasons,” after the expenditure of $18 billion.
 
On March 12, I asked Elizabeth Sherwood-Randall, a top Obama non-proliferation aide, to explain the change of policy on MOX. Echoing Gibbs, she said that the administration was expecting to find better scientific solutions.
 
But what about the joint agreement with the Russians that MOX was the way to go, after considering 40 options? In fact Obama has changed course for budgetary reasons, and possibly to appease anti-nuclear forces in his base.
 
It would seem that when it comes to straightening out the nuclear waste issue, Obama is compromised by his own hand.
 
So what will he say at the summit in the Hague? Will he have the effrontery to commit the United States again to an aggressive anti-proliferation policy? This despite the fact that he scuttled Yucca Mountain as a nuclear waste repository, and now has scuttled the chance of burning up plutonium. — For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate
 

War on the Roof: Solar Power Is Encroaching

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A warning light is flashing for the nation's electric utilities — and it is getting more persistent.
 
The utilities, big and small, for- and not-for-profit, are facing serious disruptive technology. The old business models are in danger.
 
The unlikely disruptive technology that is causing the trouble is rooftop solar power.
 
Back in the energy turbulent 1970s, solar was a gleam in the eye of environmentalists who dared to dream of renewable energy. It looked like a pipe dream.
 
Very simple solar had been deployed to heat water in desert homes since indoor plumbing became the norm. Making electricity from the sun was many orders of magnitude more complex and it was, anyway, too expensive.
 
The technology of photovoltaic cells, which make electricity directly from the sun, needed work; it needed research, and it needed mass manufacturing. Hundreds of millions of dollars later in research and subsidies, the cost of solar cells has fallen and continues to go down.
 
Today, solar certainly is not a pipe dream: It is looking like a mature industry. It is also a big employer in the installation industry. It is a player, a force in the market.
 
But solar has created a crisis for the utilities.
 
In order to incubate solar, and to satisfy solar advocates, Congress said that these “qualifying facilities” should be able not only to generate electricity for homes when the sun is shining, but also to sell back the excess to the local utility. This is called “net metering” and it is at the center of the crisis today — particularly across the Southwest, where solar installations have multiplied and are being added at a feverish rate.
 
Doyle Beneby, CEO of San Antonio, Texas-based CPS Energy, the largest municipal electric and gas utility in the nation, said, “The homes that are installing solar quickly are the more affluent ones.” The problem here, he explained, is that the utility has to maintain the entire infrastructure of wires and poles and buy back electricity generated by solar in these homes at the highest prevailing rate — often more than power could be bought on the market or generated by the utility.
 
Steve Mitnik, a utility industry consultant, said that 47 percent of the nation's electric market is residential and the larger, affluent homes — which use a lot of electricity, and generally pay more as consumption rises — are a critically important part of it. Yet these are the ones that are turning to solar generation, and expect to make a profit selling excess production to the grid.
 
But who pays for the grid? According to CPS Energy's Beneby, and others in the industry, the burden of keeping the system up and running then falls on those who can least afford it.
 
The self-generating homes still need the grid not only to sell back to but ,more importantly, to buy from when the sun isn't shining and at night.
 
For some in the utility industry, net metering is just the beginning of a series of emerging problems, including:
 
  • Big investments are needed in physical security after the sniper attack last October at PG&E Corp.'s Metcalf transmission substation, which took out 17 huge transformers that provide power to California's Silicon Valley.
 
  • New investment is needed in cybersecurity.
 
  • Improved response to bad weather is a critical issue, especially in some Mid-Atlantic states.
 
Beneby believes the solar incursion into the traditional marketplace might be the beginning of more self-generation — such as home-based, micro-gas turbines — and utilities will and must adjust. He is something of a futurist and points out that in telephones, once a purely utility service, disruption has been hugely creative.
 
Environmentalists are as disturbed as the utilities. Some are calling the imposition of a surcharge on rooftop generators, as in Arizona recently, an attempt by the greedy utilities to stamp out competition. But many are seeking alternative solutions without a war over generating, and without punishing those unable to afford their own generation.
 
Brian Keane, president of SmartPower, a green-marketing group with solar-purchase programs in Arizona and many other states, has looked for cool heads to prevail on both sides of the issue. “I don't have an answer,” he said, calling for dialogue. Also the Edison Electric Institute, a trade group, has been talking with the Natural Resources Defense Council.
 
It isn't your father's electric utility anymore, or your hippie's solar power. — For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate




 

Forget the Glass Ceiling, What about the Mortar-Board Barrier?

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Every year or so a new study, learned treatise or book comes out which says that we in the United States overdo the college thing; that we are turning out young people with bachelors degrees for jobs that don't require them or that are so poorly paid the luckless worker can't pay off his or her college loans.
 
Yet the pressure to go to college continues. Parents panic that they won't save enough money and high schoolers worry that they'll be judged by which college accepts them.
 
There are only two classes of students who don't worry: those with athletic prowess and those who are so bright that they have their pick of colleges.
 
In his book “David and Goliath,” Malcolm Gladwell makes the case against the pressure for a superschool. He tells the story of a gifted, young African- American woman with clear aptitude for science and math. She makes it into Brown, an Ivy League university, and flounders. With the cultural differences and the preponderance of other brainy students, this star student is soon lost. She ends up switching from science to a less-demanding liberal arts major.
 
Top-tier universities like Harvard, Yale, Stanford and MIT have their own punishments for their graduates. It is a sad syndrome: I went to Harvard (or one of the others), but I didn't do well in my career.
 
I've seen many carry this burden throughout their lives. As Orson Welles said, in an entirely different context, he had started at the top with early success and had nowhere to go.
 
But no punishment metered out by the vagaries of talent and chance compares to the lifelong punishment that a majority of our citizens suffer for not going to college. More than 60 percent of us don't make it into either a two- or four-year college.
 
Although they are a majority, they are treated as second-class, damaged, contaminated, inferior and deserving only of a kind of paternalism, as they paint houses, repair automobiles, bake bread, stock shelves and deliver
parcels. No longer can some of them hope to be lifted into the middle class by union membership. College mania keeps them down.
 
They aren't bumping up against the color bar or the glass ceiling, but they are victims of something as damaging: the mortar-board barrier. Go no further, you have no college degree.
 
I know about the mortar-board barrier: I bumped up against it when I came to the United States 50 years ago.
 
Because I'd left school at 16, I had a jump start in British journalism. When I got to the United States, I thought the fact that I'd been a scriptwriter at the BBC and that I'd been a junior executive on a major newspaper might qualify me for an interview or two. The personnel departments at all three TV networks told me I couldn't be considered because of a lack of college education. At The New York Times I was told that without a college degree, I couldn't be considered as a writer. But as I was leaving, the interviewer actually offered me a job as a copy editor.
 
This reminds me of what I experienced subsequently, when I was flying small airplanes. The most gifted pilot I've ever known – and who saved my life a couple of times in bad weather — hadn't finished college and was repeatedly turned down for an airline job as a result.
 
Then, there was the sad case of the cadaver pilot. There is a cottage industry in flying cadavers, usually through the night, from the place of death to the place of burial. I ran into one such cadaver pilot in the early hours of the morning in Missouri, as he was about to take off into bad weather with his silent passenger — there to remind him of his mortality and danger of flying an old airplane (a Beech 18 with radial engines).
 
Like all pilots, he loved flying, but had given up hope of moving up in aviation because hadn't been to college. Unwisely, he had fallen in love with aviation too young. Just like The New York Times that wouldn't allow a non-college-educated person to try writing for their pages, but would allow that same person to edit its writers, the irony is present in aviation.
 
While airlines and air freight companies insist on a college education, no matter what the proven skill or the number of hours the candidate has flown, air traffic controllers are mostly just high school graduates. College is not a requirement.
 
The college, non-college divide is pernicious and damaging. It is another front in the class war. — For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

The Strange Case of the NIH and an Elusive Disease

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The federal government has a mostly open dialogue with those it serves and those who serve it. This happens pretty well across government agencies, from the Pentagon to the Department of Transportation to the Department of Agriculture.
 
So it is troubling that the National Institutes of Health, an arm of the Department of Health and Human Services, appears to have no communication with a critical but ignored patient cohort: those suffering from Myalgic Encephalomyelitis, also known as Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, and often referred to only as ME/CFS. The NIH does not appear to hear the cries of the petitioners at its door; it seems to be interested only in classifying and defining the disease.
 
According to the Centers for Disease Control, ME/CFS afflicts 1 million people in the United States, and 17 million people around the world. While those numbers of victims are disputed, their suffering is not; they are ill in a terrible way.
 
ME/CFS takes healthy — often athletic — people and casts them into a shadow world of physical incapacity, mental fog, loneliness and relentless dependence on others. The suffering is measured in years and decades. Suicide is common.
 
It is a disease of the immune system, but what triggers it is unknown. Physicians who treat ME/CFS have told me that they would rather have cancer than this disease. One epidemiologist said, “With cancer, you are cured or you die. ME/CFS just goes on and on. You live the life of a zombie.”
 
From a physician devoted to treating and researching ME/CFS, this is not only a terrible admission, but also a de facto indictment of the national effort to find a cure, or even a therapy, for alleviating the suffering.
 
One of the problems affecting ME/CFS treatment is diagnosis. There are no biological labels, known as markers, that enable doctors to easily identify ME/CFS; it cannot be picked up in a blood tests or a urine sample. It is a ghostly manifestation, and doctors fall back on what is known as wastebasket diagnosis. In its simplest form, this means testing for a lot of diseases and if it does not turn out to be one of them, it could be ME/CFS.
 
But one case definition has satisfied the ME/CFS community in recent years, and it is endorsed by specialists in the field. Established in 2001, it is called the Canadian Consensus Criteria.
 
Yet, incomprehensibly, the NIH is spending some of the paltry $6 million devoted to ME/CFS, on a study to come up with a new case definition for the disease; something that no one wants and which could do real harm.
 
To do this work, the NIH selected the Institute of Medicine (IOM), which has no expertise in ME/CFS and which had drawn opprobrium with its clumsy attempt to do a case definition of Gulf War Syndrome.
 
The NIH, which has failed to explain itself in plain English, has ignited incandescent rage in the patient community and from patient advocates. In a unique outpouring of objection, 50 of the world's top doctors and clinicians wrote to Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sibelius, pleading with her not to muddy the waters and to stay with the definition which is working well. The NIH went ahead with the IOM contract.
 
So lacking is government support, moral as well as financial, that the research community, including dedicated physicians such as Andreas Kogelnik of Mountain View, Calif., Daniel Peterson of Incline Village, Nev., and Derek Enlander of New York City, feel they have to raise funds privately to continue their work. Even celebrity virus hunter Ian Lipkin of Columbia University has abandoned hope of getting his seminal work funded by the NIH and has joined the researchers who have had to hold out begging bowls to the public to do their research.
 
Judging by social media, the entire patient community is in a state of metaphorical war with the NIH.
 
There is a cry from and on behalf of the pitiable sick for action, sympathy and even courtesy from the bureaucrats in Bethesda, where the NIH is headquartered. The Hippocratic Oath says, “first do no harm.” When people are in pain and despair, inaction is palpable harm.
 
A congressional hearing is needed to investigate decision-making in the NIH, find out about its budget request to the Office of Management and Budget, and to demand that it listen to those who suffer and those who are trying to help them. — For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

Life at the Bottom: the Real Minimum Wage Saga

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I once earned the minimum wage not because I needed an entry-level job, but because I needed the money. It was a minimum-wage job or a begging bowl and the street.
 
While I learned some interesting – and some disagreeable — things about life at the bottom, I never met anyone who was there because they were entering the workforce. Instead they were a community of the hapless; some of them on their way down, but more of them just on their way to nowhere.
 
Each day, they were hired through Manpower and were sent where they were needed, if there was work that day. The hiring hall was not a place of despair but of resignation. If you were considered a good worker you would get a semi-permanent assignment. But as with most temp work, employers were prohibited from offering you a permanent job.
 
It was the winter of 1965, and the minimum wage was $1.25 an hour. By the time deductions were taken, take-home pay was about $1 an hour, which was not enough to support a family, or even to think of little things like vacations or getting one's teeth fixed.
 
Teeth stand out in my memory for two reasons. First, because my co-workers had visibly terrible teeth. Second because I once bussed a table at the Horn & Hardart automat on 42nd Street in New York, and a customer had put her false teeth on a dirty plate and I had whisked it away.
 
About an hour later – people who ate at the automat ate there because you could sit for an hour without being bothered — she discovered her loss. The most awful crying and begging resulted. Over and over, she cried, “I'll never have teeth again. I can't afford new teeth.”
 
I went to the manager, who showed me dumpsters piled high with that day's garbage. He was a decent man and we tried to find the woman's teeth. It was hopeless. Utterly hopeless. Her teeth were irretrievably lost and she went out into the night shrieking. She would never have teeth again.
 
I got back into newspapering and moved on and up. Over the decades, though, I have retained an affinity for those who draw the minimum wage, and a certain knowledge that it needs to be higher and linked to the cost of living.
 
Even so, I think the minimum wage is a two-edged sword. I think in times of near full employment, employers use it to hold down what they otherwise would have to pay. But I also think that without it, there would be terrible exploitation at the bottom – sweatshops and the like.
 
I think the minimum wage is part of the social network where those who have not yet risen and those who have fallen in life can find precarious purchase.
 
Sadly the minimum-wage job is under threat not because the Obama administration wants to raise it to $10.10, but because of the computerization of the workplace. Simply, people will be replaced with computer-driven devices no matter what the minimum wage is.
 
A great gale of change is sweeping through the workplace. We get our money from machines; increasingly, we check ourselves out of the supermarket and the drugstore; we buy our airline and train tickets online.
 
The low-wage job as well as some better ones are going. Fast-food restaurants have introduced computerized ordering. Inexorably, business is committed to replacing workers with automation. That is not new.
 
What is new is that all the jobs in the service industries, which were considered exempt from automation, are now going the way of the coal miner, the stevedore, and more than half the people it used to take to make a car or a steel beam.
 
We are having the wrong discussion over the minimum wage. We need to talk about work; all work, including work for those at the bottom — those who cannot even think about dental work, vacations or college.
 
Raising the minimum wage will not drive employers to replace workers with machines. That has already reached flood stage. — For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

Britain’s Power Peril and Its Lesson for the United States

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In Britain, they are talking about "the year the lights will go out." The metaphor is based on the 1951 film "The Day the Earth Stood Still."
 
There are those who believe they can pinpoint the year: 2023. It is the year that all but one of Britain's 16 operating nuclear power reactors will have been withdrawn from service because of their age.
 
Britain commissioned its first nuclear power plant back in 1954. For decades, Britain was at the forefront of the development of nuclear energy.
 
Then came natural gas. Discoveries in the North Sea coupled with improvements in gas turbine technology caused a boom in gas-powered electricity generation. At one point, it looked as though 50 percent more gas-fired electricity generation would be installed than needed.
 
The next surge of generating enthusiasm was for wind. Under the Labor government of Tony Blair, Britain planned to lead the world in wind generation, both on shore and off. Wind, as elsewhere, was subsidized because it was politically lovable. What better source of energy for a windswept island with a stormy coastline than wind, wind and more wind?
 
But the high cost of wind-generated electricity, coupled with intermittent availability, began to turn the country off wind. While the Conservative government of David Cameron is still pushing wind through subsidies, it has been forced into a painful re-think to avoid catastrophe.
 
Coal mines — the engine of the Industrial Revolution — began to be phased out under Margaret Thatcher's Conservative government partly because of continuing labor problems, but primarily because its cost was rising as mines became less productive. Britain became an importer of coal.
 
Nuclear just languished; the fabrication capacity declined, the design shops closed up, and the universities turned out fewer graduates in the nuclear sciences.
 
Then came the gas boom of the 1980s and '90s. The North Sea was full of it, the plants were cheap to build and operate, and the emissions were half those of coal.
 
But gas began to peak in Britain's North Sea fields in 2000, and gas imports began to rise. The jig was up for cheap, non-controversial energy.
 
Cameron's government, looking toward the day when the lights will fail, has supported an aggressive nuclear building program — none of it designed or built by British companies. The French government-owned utility, Electricite de France (EDF), will build the Britain's first new reactors; the technology will come from Areva, the French nuclear plant builder, and some of the construction funding will come from China.
 
But to lure EDF, a mechanism called the “strike price” had to be negotiated. Under this deal, the British government guarantees a floor price for the electricity generated at the new nuclear plants. The strike price for the EDF deal is $154 per megawatt hour, or about twice the current wholesale price of electricity in Britain.
 
British industry is screaming that it will be driven offshore, particularly chemicals. The European Union is screaming that this is a subsidy by another name. And British consumer groups are screaming that it will kill off old people, who will not be able to afford the Gallic electrons.
 
The Cameron government has its fingers in its ears, because it knows the screaming will be far worse if the lights do go out.
 
Across the Atlantic, a sequel to the year the lights will go out in Britain may be in production. We are already shuttering nuclear plants; the total down from 104 to 99 with many more endangered as the plants either become uneconomic, as a result of competition from our gas boom, or too old. Four big new nuclear plants are under construction in Georgia and South Carolina, but they are all that are likely to be built in the foreseeable future.
 
Currently, nuclear plants contribute 19 percent of our electricity, about the same percentage they contributed in Britain in the 1990s before plant retirements began. The numbers are being kept up by extraordinary operating efficiency gains and by upgrading– called “uprating” in the industry — the plants.
 
How long the gas boom will last is a matter of conjecture. The lifespan of the new hydraulically fractured fields is not known, but it is expected to be about one-third that of conventional fields. The full environmental consequence is not known either. Yet the euphoria of gas abundance is boosted by multimillion-dollar campaigns from the oil and gas industries, led by the giant American Petroleum Institute.
 
These advertisements give the impression that gas is forever in America. The way it was in the North Sea? — For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

Cheerio, Your Job Has Been Computerized

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Some thoughts about work. It is under attack from a giant labor pool of maybe 200 million eager and qualified people in Asia and elsewhere, who will do it for less than it costs in the United States.
 
It also is under attack everywhere from computerization. Stated bluntly: if jobs are not going to Asia, they may be going to the cloud. The service sector, once the saving grace of the post-industrial world of work, is being computerized: no more people needed. 
 
The somber back story at the recent National Federation of Retailers annual convention and expo at the Javits Center in New York City, as recorded in The Washington Post, was not about new shopping centers, point-of-sale displays, the minimum wage or offshore call centers for warranties: it was about Amazon. Online retailing is eating up traditional retailing — and retailers have seen the future, and it is bleak.
 
Two University of Oxford researchers, Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael A. Osborne, recently calculated that 47 percent of American jobs are under threat from computerization. The only major publication that dwelt on this extraordinary study was The Economist.
 
Even those spoiled children of society, university professors, are feeling the cold winds from the computer vortex. Online learning is shaking up the quietude in the ivory towers. While they have to do something to improve the productivity of their academic staffs, this is not the way.
 
Against this threatening employment sky rages the debate over the minimum wage. But it is a debate that is too narrow; too much about the short-term interests of the employers of minimum-wage earners and too little, if at all, about the endangered workplace. The spurious argument is that any increase in the minimum wage will drive employers to install more computer substitution of workers. 
 
They are hell-bent on that anyway. Look around: checkout counters are being automated; book manufacture is threatened by e-readers; telephones are answered by other telephones, guided by the unseen hand of computers. Soon even those vilified call-center jobs in India, will be under threat. Here, your doctor will not want as many support staff, as records go the Web.
 
The minimum wage should be raised. It will not stop the rush to substitute humans with computer-driven gadgets. When a machine can be finely tuned to cook and serve hamburgers, a machine will be cooking and serving hamburgers. All those untruths about jobs in fast-food chains being only entry level will fade away. 
 
Meanwhile, go into any fast food outlet and count the people who are middle-aged: They are not there because it is a way in. It is a way of hanging on – especially for African Americans and Hispanics. The same is true for hotel room cleaning, chicken-plucking in processing plants, cleaning toilets in commercial buildings, warehouse working and those toiling in the night kitchens of bakeries. Entry into what? Hell?
 
I once earned the minimum wage in New York City. At the hiring hall, I can tell you, there were only those exiting the job world not entering it.
 
You will not get rich driving a non-union truck, either. Delivery people do it because they have no other skill and almost none of them are candidates for retraining, another shibboleth. Wherever there is menial work that is not unionized, there is economic misery.
 
Recently, I attended a conference in Europe — where the jobs problem is as bad as here, and possibly more intransigent — and speakers were talking openly about a decline in the standard of living. We, in the United States, are not immune. Those who have enjoyed middle-class comfort may have to face a devaluation in their quality of life: less and crowded housing, less travel, a smaller, older car or no car, more hourly work and less security, no medical procedures for ailments that some computer may deem elective. Grimmer daily lives that are more 19th century than 21st century.
 
The debate over the minimum wage ought to be a national discussion of the future of work. A rising tide does not lift all the boats anymore. — For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate


Sorry, but There Are Areas Where We Need More Government

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Who is going to finance advanced drugs? Who is going to guarantee the electric supply in 30 years? Whisper this: It will be the government.
 
In these two areas and others, the risks are now so large that private enterprise — so beloved in so many quarters — can't shoulder the risk alone. When development risks run into the billions of dollars, the market won't sanction private companies taking those risks.
 
Drug companies, among the richest of corporations, are running up against the the realities of risk. To develop a new drug, the pharmaceutical industry — known collectively as Big Pharma — has to commit well over a billion dollars.
 
It is a long and risky road. A need for the drug has to be established; a compound developed, after maybe thousands of failed efforts. Tests have to be conducted on animals, then in controlled human trials. If the drug works, the developers have to get it certified by the Food and Drug Administration. Then they have to market it and buy hugely expensive insurance — if they can get it — because it is almost a rite of passage that they will be sued.
 
Under this regime complex diseases, that may require multiple drugs, get short shrift not because the developers of drugs are greedy, but because they honestly cannot afford that kind of research.
 
The result is that the pharmaceutical companies increasingly look to universities and individual researchers — sometimes in teaching hospitals — to find new therapies; research that is paid for by the government through grants from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the Centers for Disease Control, even from the Department of Defense. Even so, drug research is lagging and NIH is turning down eight out of 10 grant requests.
 
In electricity supply, too, there is trouble ahead.
 
The electric utilities, since deregulation, have become risk averse. Only two utilities, the Southern Company of Georgia and Scana Corporation of South Carolina are building new base-load nuclear power plants. These may be the last of the large nuclear power plants to be built in the United States. They are both located in states where electric utilities are regulated and where they can anticipate their costs being recovered in the rates, even during construction. The states are taking some of the risk.
 
For the rest of the country, and particularly the Northern and Western states, deregulation has had an unintended result: It has increased the risk of new construction and in so doing has set the utilities down the path of least resistance. They have turned to natural gas and — because of subsidies and tax breaks — to wind power, which has meant more gas power has to be installed to compensate for variance in the wind.
 
Coal is being edged out of the market for environmental reasons. So the electric utility industry is being pushed into a strategic position it has always said it wanted avoid: over-reliance on too few sources of power.
 
A kind of gas euphoria has gripped the nation as supplies from horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing have shot up. When the 99 reactors now operating go out of service, as they get to the end of their lives, there will be nothing comparable to replace them.
 
Many companies, some of them small, are working on new reactor designs that would put the United States back into world leadership in nuclear, while answering criticism of the big light water plants of today. Most of them would even burn nuclear waste.
 
In a time of deficits, the government tends, both with new electrical generating systems and in medical research, to scatter money in the hope that this will lead to the huge private commitments that are needed.
 
Sadly, this creates a dynamic in which companies rush in to consume the seed money without being able to bring the product to to fruition. It is a push rather than a pull dynamic.
 
Government works well, even efficiently, when it establishes a pull dynamic, as in the space program and in supercomputers, or most military procurement. The Pentagon does not issue funds for companies to experiment with weapons systems: It commissions them.
 
The government may have to commission new drugs and new power technologies in the high-risk future. — For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate



 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

The Ties Don’t Bind Anymore

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A nationwide alert, no, a worldwide alert, should be issued for the necktie. It is in great danger. It is disappearing. Soon it may be consigned to history, to live on only in old movies, like people smoking and men in hats.
 
I am not sure who signed the death warrant for the necktie, but I have my suspicions. It is a long chain of perfidy.
 
First, there was Hollywood. Actors who appear on TV talk shows – and most actors do more appearing on talk shows than acting, in the hope that this will get them jobs, so they can do more acting than appearing on talk shows – did in the necktie. One cannot calculate what these innocent little strips of cloth did to the Hollywood Hills crowd – but actors will not be caught in a suit and tie unless they are playing someone who wears a suit and tie.
 
Then there is the dotcom crowd; billionaires who declared by their actions that creative people ought to dress as though they worked for a landscaper not the estate owners. Remember Steve Jobs, who starred in many iterations of his own show “Genius in Jeans”?
 
Well Jobs was a genius, but he was also dressed like a slob, flaunting an everyman image when he was anything but. Now every man is going around the way Steve Jobs did, except minus the genius and the billions.
 

No! No! For me the suit and tie is my native habitat. It is where I am secure — as safe as ordering chardonnay.
 
It all began with my first day of school, when I first put on what was to become the suit of my life: shirt, tie, jacket, hat or cap. When I left school, my father bought me a suit, two shirts and four collars (those were the faraway days when shirts had detachable collars) and told me I would be paying rent if I chose to stay at home. Who said the good old days were so good?
 
My first serious sartorial crisis was at a newspaper in London. It was Saturday, and I ventured in in a sports jacket tie and flannels. The news editor (city editor) exploded.
 
“Are you going to a cricket match?” he demanded.
 
“No, sir, I thought it would be all right, as it is Saturday.”
 
“All right? It is not bloody all right! I cannot send you to Buckingham Palace dressed like that.”
 
“You want me to go to Buckingham Palace?”
 
“No! I want you to go home and contemplate a career change.”
 
So I stuck with a suit and tie, but it did not save me awkwardness. At a party in Tel Aviv, given so that I could meet members of the Knesset, I showed up in a summer suit and tie. I was the only man in a suit. The only man with a tie. The only man with a jacket. The odd man out.
 
I trailed around China, as a member of the press corps accompanying President Clinton on his visit. My colleagues joke about my formality of dress, so I took the plunge. When we went to the Great Hall of the People, off Tiananmen Square, to watch Clinton appear with Chinese President Jiang Zemin, I went casual.
 
By some secret telegraph, to which I was not privy, my colleagues dressed up; every man in a jacket and tie except me, looking ridiculous and disrespectful in a golf shirt. That is what happens when you let go of your principles.
 
Sometimes sartorial failure is collective. At a U.S.-Japan conference on the Big Island of Hawaii, the first morning the American delegation, including myself, showed up in island wear. The Japanese delegation wore formal suits. After the refreshment break, the Americans had rushed to their rooms to get into suits and the Japanese to get into island wear.
 
If President Obama were to appear at an international conference without a tie, it would be all over for the necktie; it would move from the endangered species category to the extinct. He would do it in as thoroughly as bareheaded Jack Kennedy did in the gentleman's hat. Are we better off, I ask you? — For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate


 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

The Shame of Biomedical Research in the U.S.

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When the dark shadow of incurable disease settles across a life, it is brightened only by the hope that science is on the job: The cavalry will come.
Horribly the cavalry — researchers in the big pharmaceutical companies and the government-run National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control — may not even have mounted.
 
New drug development is a murky business governed by huge risks, inertia, bureaucracy and politics.
 
I've been looking at the role of biomedical research and the development of new therapies and drugs through the lens of one disease, Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS), also known as Myalgic Encephalomyelitis. But it is symptomatic of the whole struggle for cures, which means funds. It is a peephole into a system in chaos; where good intentions, economic reality, public pressure, politics and bureaucratic apathy play a role in where the research dollars go.
 
I've been writing about CFS for several years now, so I understand the dilemmas those who are in charge of biomedical research in government and private industry face. It is a disease of the the immune system, like AIDS, but it is mostly a medical enigma. It is hard to diagnose because there are no normal markers in blood or urine. It prostrates its victims essentially for life. In its severest form, patients lie in bed in darkened rooms, often feeling that their bones are going to explode. It cries out for more research, as do many other little understood diseases.
 
A very small coterie of physicians — maybe not many more than 50 in the United States — specialize in CFS and have developed private clinics for research into alleviating therapies. None of them are set up to do major drug research in the way that pharmaceutical companies do.
 
Big Pharma — as the drug behemoths are known collectively — is at the heart of new drug development, aided by preceding biomedical research that takes place through government grants to researchers in universities, teaching hospitals and private clinics. It is a complex matrix.
 
A new drug can cost over $1.2 billion to develop. It is a very high-risk undertaking — maybe the riskiest investment decision made in the private sector is developing a new drug. It is also a tortuous undertaking.
 
First a target has to be selected where there is a large enough patient cohort to establish a market. Then the science begins. Diseases that are straightforward, in medical terms, edge out those where the causes may be multiple and the resolution may require a cocktail of drugs. Understandably, a rifle shot is more appealing than a shotgun blast. Eight out of 10 drugs fail and are abandoned at some point. The winners have to pay for the losers.
 
If, after years of research, a compound that may work is discovered, the laborious business of testing it on animals must precede human trials with control groups and years of analysis. Finally the drug must be approved by the Food and Drug Administration which looks for efficacy, safety, risk benefit and manufacturing stability.
 
Into this already difficult world of new drug development, enter the politicians.
 
Some believe private enterprise will shoulder all the risks and is the right place for research. Others don't understand the vital role that government research grants — administered by NIH and CDC — play in the development of biomedical knowledge: the essential precursor to new drugs and therapies. Its funding is on a see-saw; it was down under sequestration and funding is restored but not boosted under the new budget deals. It tops out at $29.9 billion, a decline of 25 percent since 2003, according to The Atlantic magazine.
 
Chronic Fatigue Syndrome — which has 1 million Americans suffering hopelessly every day — gets about $6 million a year from NIH. What's wrong with that largesse? Well, remember, it costs $1.2 billion to develop a new drug once the biomedical case is made. As they say, you do the math – and don't expect the cavalry to ride to the rescue anytime soon.
 
Across the board, researchers are dependent on government funds augmented by foundations and charitable giving. Yet biomedical research pays as a national investment. American drugs are an export commodity, the cost of healthcare is contained and, yes, the suffering is reduced even as life is extended. China, by the way, has said it will surpass the United States in actual biomedical research dollars in five years. — For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate