White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

The Government Pulls Better than It Pushes

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Anyone who knows anything about railroads knows pulling is better than pushing. If you want to change the world, pull, don't push. This is especially true in the introduction of new technology.

Sadly, we are politically better at pushing than pulling. Congress, in particular, feels it is well-equipped to push and poorly equipped to pull. Its favored tool for pushing is the tax incentive. This is a subsidy in disguise, designed to propel a technology into the market.

It is the driving dynamic behind today's world of ethanol, solar, wind and the much-anticipated, smart electric grid. Pushing is good, if you understand that it is also inefficient. It hears the market imperfectly and, as a result, begs for unending government indulgence.

If the government is to have a role in the market of inventions, and in today's world it is obliged to, make it the customer not the inventor, hatchery manager or midwife. Let it pull and reward the winner not the wannabes.

A random sampling of technology that the government pulled into the market place:

·         The supercomputer. In 1955 Edward Teller, father of the hydrogen bomb, railed in now declassified documents about the inadequacy of “computing machines.” To achieve this goal, the national weapons labs bought computers, the bigger the better, sight unseen.

·         The Internet. This was invented to safeguard communications, not because it was a good idea that might find a market. Classic pull over push.

·         The aeroderivative turbine. This machine has revolutionized the burning of natural gas by electric utilities; but its genesis–its pull–came from the need for higher temperatures in fighter jet engines.

The pattern, of course, is clear. When the military is the customer, the puller, all the parts of the chain of invention come into play: private industry, academia and suppliers of components.

A new opportunity is at hand for the government to pull a technology into the market and strengthen the national defense, in military and civilian dimensions. The product is the small modular reactor. There is wide agreement that it is a good idea, but it looks set to be taken over by the push people, with all the known waste and inefficiency. Already, the designs are circulating along with calculations of how much government push is needed. Heaven forbid.

On the shelf there already exist many small reactor designs, some military and some civilian. In 1959 the government built a nuclear-powered, civilian ship called the NS Savannah. It used a safe, small reactor that has been decommissioned long since, but which is a starting point.

Another reactor was designed and built for a West German, nuclear-powered, trade and research ship called the Otto Hahn. The contractor was the American nuclear company Babcock & Wilcox.

Babcock has emerged and is a contender for the small reactor. Problem is that civilian nuclear culture is now mired in push, i.e. money from the government. Money for investigating, not delivering.

Yet there is a military need here and now that becomes more urgent all the time. The military needs a reactor that can provide power on forward bases: Diesel is expensive and depends on long, vulnerable supply lines.

We know how to make small nuclear reactors already, both civilian and military. Why don't we do it?

The USS Enterprise–one of the greatest examples of naval engineering ever–has eight small reactors on board. Other ships and submarines of the nuclear Navy have two reactors each.

We should shelve the idea of loan guarantees and build a small reactor, initially for new military use on bases, forward and otherwise.

For 40 years I've been asking why haven't we learned more from the Navy about small reactors? They work so well.

When James R. Schlesinger was chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, he said it was an excellent question. So I took it to the legendary Adm. Hyman G. Rickover, whose attitude was that the Navy had disclosed enough in handing over the light water technology in the Shippingport reactor in Pennsylvania.

The truth is the Navy is reluctant to get embroiled in what it sees as the civilian nuclear swamp, where their derivative reactors would be examined in licensing proceedings and subjected to scrutiny by anti-nuclear groups like the Union of Concerned Scientists. – For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

 

 

 

A National Conversation on Government

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There’s a bear in our backyard. He’s often there and just two days ago he walked, well, lumbered down the road in front of our house, turned up the driveway, and unhurriedly disappeared into some woods behind the house.

 

It was alarming to see the bear in the road. Foxes and deer are killed there with great frequency by cars. I want the bear to be safe, so my wife and I wondered who in the government we should call. There must be a program for bears who are penetrating built-up areas (we live only 45 miles from Washington, D.C.)

 

We haven’t yet called the government. Which one, federal, state or county? Which department? Agriculture, animal welfare, forestry, land conservation, or just our congressman and let him worry about the electoral dynamics of saving bears? There may be enough people worried about bears becoming roadkill that there are votes in it.

 

The main thing is that somewhere in the enormous apparatus of government, I know there is someone who worries about errant bears. In this case, I’m glad that we have big government so that when I decide who to call, someone will tell me what to do about my ursine neighbor.

 

But there’s the rub also. What’s the role of government in society and how much should it do, or how much should we expect it to do? You’d think this had been hammered out in the seminal events of the 18th century.

 

If we’re going to have a national conversation about anything, let’s have it about the role of government. What’s proper for government to shoulder and what should be done in the private sector?

 

The ongoing debate about health care highlights the clear divisions in the country about the responsibilities of government. Liberals, it seems to me, want the government in there, offering its own insurance. Conservatives want the government out, but they want it to do a few things on the way through the door such as forcing private insurers to take patients with pre-existing conditions, assuring greater portability and granting relief to small employers.

 

Liberals and conservatives alike say they want less government, but they have very different ideas about what that reduced government should do; so the government, under both Republicans and Democrats, grows.

 

Liberals think that too much of our national treasure goes into weapons systems, defensive and aggressive. Conservatives think that the government can’t get anything right and should largely be supplanted by the private sector.

 

Here are some big things that could be privatized, although whether they would be better is unknown: air traffic control, the Tennessee Valley Authority, the postal service, the administration of the national parks and the Government Printing Office. Government should be prohibited from competing with the private sector in small things like publishing periodicals and books, and organizing conferences.

 

But does anyone think that the National Institutes of Health should be handed over to the pharmaceutical industry?

 

Or consider these problems which, somewhere one hopes, the government is working on: the effects of rising sea levels; the over-fishing of the oceans; the notorious Panama disease, which is wiping out bananas; the mysterious and massive death of U.S. honeybees; and the proliferation of feral pythons, which are endangering cats, dogs and possibly people in Florida and soon across the South.

 

Without government research, we wouldn’t have the Internet, Velcro, the aeroderivitive turbine, or the cute little winglets on jet airplanes which make them less lethal to other jet airplanes. If, like the Europeans, we decided the government should get behind the arts, we’d have many opera companies to rival the New York Met and provincial theater would boom.

 

I’m ambivalent about health care reform because I’m on Medicare and I think it’s dandy; but I wish my wife’s insurance wasn’t so expensive. Right now, I’d like someone in the government–someone with real clout–to do something to keep the bear in my backyard from becoming roadkill. Will he join the sad roster of bears, deer and foxes that became roadkill because the government didn’t care? I tell you it would be different if bears voted.  — For Hearst-New York Times Syndicate