White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

A Third Way to Fix the Undocumented Workers Problem

by Leave a Comment

By Llewellyn King

Sometimes a better idea is so obvious and so simple that it is overlooked.

For example, it took automobile manufacturers nearly 100 years to realize that drivers and passengers might like to drink something on their journeys, and might need a place in their vehicles to put their drinks. Then they did not get there without a shove from a chain of convenience stores, which started giving away simple plastic devices that clipped onto a window — woe betide you if you inadvertently opened the window.

According to one man, and his band of dedicated followers, that is what is happening with the immigration debate. He does not propose to solve the issue, but rather to defuse it; to introduce a “third way” which will help those who live in fear of a knock on the door from deportation officers, as well as those who bear the cost of their illegal status.

Illegal immigrants — or undocumented immigrants, if you prefer the gentler term — live in what is, in effect, a kind of open prison. They dare not leave the United States because they cannot return. They flit in the shadows, imposing huge costs on local communities for education, healthcare, housing, policing and prisons.

The man with the idea as simple as a cup holder is Mark Jason, 77, a fiscal conservative, who lives in Malibu, Calif. For six years, he has been at the helm of the Immigrant Tax Inquiry Group, an organization he created and finances.

The core of Jason’s plan is to issue illegal immigrants who are working or want to work with a 10-year, special work permit that can be renewed. No amnesty; no citizenship, nor talk of mass-citizenship. The permit holders and their families would be able to leave the country and return, but that is just part of the plan.

There is a caveat, and it is the key to the plan: A 5-percent tax would be levied on both the workers and the employers, which would raise $176 billion over a 10-year period. Instead of going into general revenue, that money would be employed where the illegal immigrants are distorting local economies.

“The model creates $100 billion to act as a financial salve to help heal our immigration issues, and $76 billion to be used for our needed infrastructure,” Jason said, adding, “We calculate that if we allocate 40 percent of the total revenue of $176 billion, we can create over 1.4 million American jobs at $50,000 each in a wide spectrum of fields, including health, education, law enforcement and construction.”

Under the plan, he said, “we would get people out of the emergency rooms and into healthcare plans.”

Gone would be the 18-percent “nanny tax,” which few employers or immigrants actually pay. Gone too, for the most part, would be the more important Individual Tax Identification Number (ITIN), which Jason, a former Internal Revenue Service special agent and university budget officer, says accounts for the loss of more than $50 billion over 10 years in fraud. Fraud occurs, for example, when ITIN tax filers claim imaginary dependents for excessive tax credits.

Anyone can get an ITIN number, and many undocumented workers paying ITIN tax believe that it is a path of sorts to legality; that one day, they will be able to show they have worked, paid taxes and, therefore, are upstanding people worthy of citizenship.

Jason sees himself as a man who fixes things. After graduating from high school in Mexico in the 1950s, he learned to fix diesel engines because he was appalled by the pollution from their exhaust – pollution he found to be worse than that in his native Los Angeles. He also studied animal husbandry, so that he could try to fix the problem of “scrawny cattle and hogs” in Mexico.

In 2007, Jason heard that the California State University system did not have the funds to admit 8,000 new students. “That was the system that gave me the two distinctly different majors that helped me throughout life, and I wanted other students to have the same opportunity,” he said. So he worked on a state tax reform fix.

Now Jason, who has held briefings in Washington, needs to find a member of Congress who will write a bill and introduce it. — For InsideSources

 

The Myth of Immigrant Assimilation

by 1 Comment

By Llewellyn King

In the aftermath of the Brussels attacks, critics are blaming Belgium for not assimilating immigrants from the Middle East and North Africa.

The fact is that Europe does not do assimilation. Europeans widely practice what might be called “anti-assimilation.” Instead of engagement with their immigrants, they practice a kind of look-the-other-way stance.

Muslim immigrants on the whole do not seek to integrate into European societies, but rather to demand that European societies adopt their ways. In Belgium, which has three official languages, Dutch, French and German, there are constant demands that Arabic become a fourth. Muslims in Britain, and throughout Europe, demand shari’a, or Islamic law, for their communities. Muslims in Europe, and the United States, demand that Eid al-Adha (Feast of the Sacrifice) be accorded the same recognition as a public holiday as Christmas.

Muslim defenders, after the bombings in Brussels, insist that Western countries with large Muslim minorities should do more to integrate them into national life. But this integration mostly means that the host culture should bow to the insurgent one.

In ancient lands, like Britain and France, this is an affront; as though the extraordinary traditions of those countries should be shoved aside to accommodate the cultural demands of an a very antagonistic minority. That is asking too much.

Europe has mostly dealt with the challenge by hoping that new generations born in Europe and subjected to the influence of European education, the arts and media will become little Europeans: little Frenchmen, little Belgians, little Englishmen, versed in European history and imbued with European values. There are such people throughout Europe, from those of Turkish descent in Germany to those of Indian descent in Britain and North African descent in France.

But by and large the Muslim minorities remain separate, unequal and belligerently hostile to the countries that have given them shelter and opportunity. Rather than the generations born in Europe adopting European norms, they have ended in an unfortunate place where they are outcasts by their own inclinations and by the difficulties posed by European societies, which are quietly nationalistic, closed, eyes-averted.

If anything, the separation has grown worse for generations that know no life other than the one they lead in Europe. This is often marginal, lived in ghettos like the banlieues, the suburbs to the north of Paris, the troubled Brussels neighborhood of Molenbeek, or Bradford in the north of England.

The original immigrants could look back to what they had escaped, whether it was war and persecution in Algeria, in the case of those who migrated to France, or the grinding poverty that prevailed in Pakistan, in the British case. People move for safety or for a better life. They do not move because they want a new food or a new religion: They want the old food and the old religion in a better place.

Trouble is that three or four generations on, the immigrant descendants may not feel they are in a better place. They are isolated, largely unemployed and subjected to the preaching of murderous extremists.

Once in Brussels, my wife and I were walking down a side street not far from the Grand Place. My wife, who lived in the Middle East and speaks Arabic, remarked that we had left Europe within a few streets and entered North Africa.

As we passed some young men standing outside a cafe, she heard one say to another in Arabic, “What are they doing here? They don’t belong here.”

When the London suburb of Brixton was becoming a black enclave, favored by West Indian immigrants, I lived nearby. “Don’t go there. Maybe they will leave one day,” my neighbors said when I wanted to go there.

No-go areas are not always that: they also are not-want-to-go areas. Someone has to want assimilation, if that is the answer. — For InsideSources


The Tribulations of the Ultra-Rich

by Leave a Comment

Take a moment, if you would, to pity the derided billionaire class. I have been watching them with keen interest on television. And based on my viewing, I can tell you that life at the top is miserable, boring and fraught.

One program features private islands, where the unimaginably rich get away from it all. But part of what the unimaginably rich get away from is the unimaginable loneliness of being stuck in unimaginable isolation. When the hideaway-from-it-all has been furnished in unimaginable opulence, the favored one is off to another home in so-close-to-it-all New York, London, Palm Beach or Aspen. Anywhere you can while away the day with a Bloomberg Terminal.

Why, you ask, do those who want to get away from it all and protect their privacy favor their New York residences over their other five homes? Call it Greta Garbo Syndrome. “I want to be left alone,” she said. Had she not heard of Nebraska?

From this you can deduce that those who are rich beyond counting, but count anyway, do not want to be left alone at all. They long for control — and you do not control much staring at your Impressionist masterpieces on your private island in the Bahamas.

Apparently, the super ridiculously rich yearn to entertain. One television program on buying mega yachts reveals all. The purchasers are prepared to plunk down around $70 million for what they seem to think is a floating hotel suite. They do not want to know about the yacht’s seaworthiness, crew requirement, propulsion, fuel consumption and range. No, they want to know how much closet space there is in the master stateroom (For what on a boat? Presumably, haute couture gowns and bespoke suits, and handmade deck shoes.) and how much deck space there is to entertain. Maybe they’re not planning to leave the dock in Ft. Lauderdale, Martha’s Vineyard, or wherever. A mega yacht is not for ocean voyaging. The captain will take the watery penthouse to Monaco or Bali. You will go in the private jet.

Friends, it appears, are a particular problem for those beyond the dreams of avarice. Ever since Lady Astor and her famous dining room that seated 400, it will not do to have fewer than 400 friends. But they have to be the right friends: people famous in the arts or the very top of the media, like Charlie Rose. I hear he is on every list. Ordinary people will not do. If you are rich enough, people will always want to be your friend. Ask Donald Trump.

One billionaire babe told me, “I only lunch with,” and she named another billionaire babe, “Everyone else just wants money.” How perceptive from someone who inherited a great fortune. We assume she is not parting with any of it — especially to some lunch supplicant.

No, the places where the ungodly rich load up on friends is at charity balls. “Darling, we’ve just snapped up a charming little place in the Hamptons. You must copter out.” Translation: Don’t you dare show your face, but tell everyone else about our 16-bedroom, 20-bathroom, beachfront monument to vulgarity.

If you have it all, you want to keep it always. You are obsessed with age. Age means health must come first. Those who have not in their luxurious boredom fallen prey to drugs and booze are in the thralls of life-extension through diet and exercise.

Once in a café on the main street in Aspen, I watched a famous and indecently rich and thin matron inquire of the server, “Are your muffins sweetened with apple juice or sugar?”

“Apple juice, ma’am,” the young man responded.

“I will take one,” she said.

When she left the café, I asked how the young man knew about the muffin’s sweetener.

“I don’t,” he said. “But I know what she wants to hear.”

Trickery is another burden on the ultra rich. — For InsideSources

America’s Year of Thinking Dangerously

by 1 Comment

By Llewellyn King

If you accept that seminal means an event or moment after which things will never be the same again, then we are living through a seminal year.

In matters big and small, change is in the wind.

This wind blew through Iowa and New Hampshire, and is defining the 2016 presidential election. Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders are not so much the leaders of this time of change, but rather the products.

The product is something hard to pin down, but it is there nonetheless — a sense that it is time to turn the page, to read the next chapter; a yearning for something fresh.

The millennials, hunched over their cell phones, are looking for the future in their small screens. The rest of us are looking for it in new leaders, new lifestyles; and new thinking, sometimes about old ideas.

Societies go through periods when they feel the need to change up things. But they want a sped-up evolution rather than a full-fledged revolution. This is such a time.

Change is everywhere from the bold, new things television is doing — frontal nudity, gay coupling and interracial love — to the kind of car we favor.

While we grapple with change and yearn for the new, we are surprisingly open-minded. American values appear to be undergoing a recalibration: We are getting more socially tolerant. Social conservatives are a diminished force.

Young people do not have the same commitment their parents had to conventional employment, to be defined by where they work. This leads to a world where people are less concerned with appearances, and all that goes with appearances. The business suit and its essential accoutrement, the necktie, are on the way out – and in much of the country, they are now curiously out of date. Apartments are being favored over houses because of new social values.

My generation experienced the hopeful 1940s (just the tail end), the smug 1950s, the turbulent 1960s, the oil-shocked 1970s, and the computer-excited 1980s, which continued unabated until the dot-com bubble burst at the turn of the century – but re-inflated with new developments in Internet products like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.

In recent times, the only new American billionaire outside of the Internet was Hamdi Ulukaya, who popularized Greek yogurt in country hungry for yogurt choices. That is a dumbfounding fact. It means that it will be harder to get investment in old-line businesses and start-ups. The smart money has become myopically obsessed with the cyberworld.

If you were to go to Wall Street today to raise money for a new nuclear reactor that put all doubts of the past to rest and offered income for 100 years — there are such machines on the drawing board – you would find it hard to raise money; easier for a new Internet messaging system. This when there is no shortage of Internet messages (too many, I cry each morning). We are leery of the hard and enamored of the soft.

We sense that the education system is not doing its job; that it is broken and needs fixing. But how, we are not sure. We are sure, though, that we are going to change it.

We sense that we had the dynamic wrong in foreign affairs; that change at home, like toppling a generation of political leadership, is desirable, while toppling leaders abroad is a fraught undertaking, as with Saddam Hussein, Muammar Gaddafi and Bashar al-Assad.

We feel less good about the wealthy, and we are less sure that there are secure places for us in the future. We watch cooking shows and order in pizza. We gave up smoking and started jogging. But we are, so to speak, deaf to the damage we are doing to our ears with incessant music piped to them by earbuds.

We are more nationalistic and less confident at the same time. We treasure our values more, and wonder about their long-term durability.

The largest contradiction that can easily be inspected is in the themes of Trump and Sanders: Trump has rehabilitated a kind of racism aimed at immigrants, while Sanders has made the taboo word “socialism” acceptable in political dialogue.

The desire for change has moved from a slight wish to a hard desire for a new alignment. It is everywhere, from what we eat to how we feel about the climate. But we do not agree on this new alignment, hence the huge gulf between Sanders followers and Trump adherents. — For InsideSources

Nuclear Inventions Are Here, but not to Stay

by Leave a Comment

By Llewellyn King

In February, about 200 of the most gifted engineers and scientists you can squeeze into a single meeting room will be sharing PowerPoints at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, near Knoxville, Tenn.

They will not be rocket scientists, but they may as well be. They will be nuclear engineers, physicists, chemists and entrepreneurs advocating new designs for reactors that will make electricity and medical isotopes and burn up nuclear waste.

When you get away from the politics and other restraints that have so arrested traditional reactor deployment in the United States in recent years, wonderful ideas spring forth. Scientists, I assure you, when gathered together can generate as much enthusiasm as any other creative cohort for planning wondrous things for the future.

Creative people are not just those who work with paint, musical notes, and words, but also those who pour over complex calculations, look at the atomic nature of matter, and design wondrous machines that will make electricity, create medicines, clean the air and purify the water.

Invention is narcotic. Yes, call them mad scientists but new ideas, as yet untrammeled, are stimulative — and even aphrodisiacal.

That is why one of the most exciting places I will go to this year will be the Advanced Reactors Technical Summit III at Oak Ridge on Feb. 10-11. For several years, I have attended this conference, organized by the U.S. Nuclear Infrastructure Council, in other places, including Argonne National Laboratory in Chicago. I can report that nuclear engineers are as boyish in their enthusiasm for the possibilities of bending the atom to human need as college football coaches are when they survey the new recruits. Possibility lifts the spirits.

In Oak Ridge there will be schemes, dreams and some very creative engineering. There will be designs for fast reactors, that can burn nuclear waste as fuel; molten salt reactors, thorium reactors, and small modular reactors. Some will be incremental improvements on old ideas, others will be concepts created from whole cloth. All will strive for safety through design.

But the creators assembling in Oak Ridge do so against a background that is sorrowful for them and their industry.

The United States — the crucible of nuclear invention — looks to be losing its place as the leader in nuclear energy. American utilities are not lining up to build new nuclear plants, and old ones are likely to keep going out of service. Edward Davis, president of the Pegasus Group, talks about a “nuclear cliff” – a time around 2030, when most of the U.S. nuclear fleet will be retired. Then nuclear — which produces no carbon and has a life cycle of up to 80 years — will dwindle to a handful of reactors, just when our promises under the Paris COP21 climate conference agreement call for big reductions in carbon.

Brilliant men and women are designing reactors that may change everything to do with electricity generation and isotope production. But they doubt that their first-of-kind reactors will be built and licensed in the United States. Nuclear design is almost limitless; the parameters are very flexible and the future tantalizing.

These engineers, to a person, are looking overseas to build and demonstrate their machines – mostly in China, India and the United Arab Emirates. Even Bill Gates, who is supporting a revolutionary traveling wave reactor, is working with the Chinese.

That is a sadness and a bitterness that will also be present at the advanced reactor conference in Tennessee. — For InsideSources

 

Lament of the Airline Coach Passenger

by Leave a Comment

By Llewellyn King

The vice president for mollifying irate customers of one of the great airlines — there are only four left, and by the time you read this it may be down to three — has written me asking how I “enjoyed” my last flight. I wonder if this jokester even knows what that word enjoy means? Do they have access to dictionaries at Big Air? I couldn’t even get a second cup of coffee from a surly flight attendant, who only wanted to sit in the back of the plane and kvetch about the latest merger.

Definitely, asking you about the quality of your flight is in dubious taste: Have any Big Air executives ever walked back to coach, where we sit like rowers without oars in a trireme.

My missive from Big Air asks questions like, “How did you enjoy your reception at the check-in?” It said I should evaluate my level of experience from “very satisfied” to “very dissatisfied.”

How can you relate in those terms to a machine called a “kiosk”? As it so happens, my kiosk had serious socialization problems. It’s the seventh kiosk from the left at Washington Dulles International Airport, and it’s determined to prove its recalcitrance from the get-go. It rejected my credit card; it didn’t know my frequent flier number; it told me I wasn’t flying anywhere, as I didn’t exist because it couldn’t “get my record.”

It became quite civil, though, when trying to sell me a larger seat, take a fee for my baggage, and offering to sell me more frequent flier miles. What for? Does Kiosk No. 7 know they have 304 blackout days a year?

Having secured my ticket, I moved on to security — where some TSA worker any day now may be nabbed by a casting director for the archetypal role of a terrorist – which took a grim view of me. I stood bereft of shoes, belt, wallet and all identification so that I could put my hands in the air in a glass contraption. Another incipient movie bad guy examined the screen. Not good enough. I got wanded. Of course, if someone had made off with my plastic tray of possessions while this is going on, I’d have become stateless: undocumented, illegal.

Then I found that I was in Zone 4 for boarding. I’m always in Zone 4, no matter when I book my flight. I suppose I was pre-selected for Zone 4 on account of some library book I never returned. This means there wouldn’t be any room for my suitcase in the overhead compartment, and it’d be taken from me as though I’d been apprehended doing something I shouldn’t.

At least I’ve been saved sitting in a seat too small for its designed purpose for 20 minutes more than necessary. The seat that was too small for me, too small for smaller people, and very much too small for the enormous man who sat next to me.

Did you know they’ve got new seats now without a place to put your book or magazine? They have slim backs to reduce comfort and so more seats can be jammed in.

Then there was the toilet. You must use the one at the back because the people in first class – actually they’re not people, they’re corporate lawyers, a subset of homo sapiens — cannot be expected to share their spacious commode with the likes of coach travelers, who have a social disease: less money.

Here’s a tip you’ll appreciate if you’re a man: Decide which bodily function you plan to execute because there’s no room to turn around. No. 1, walk straight in; No. 2, back in. Women always have to back in.

The pilot came on. He sounded as though his last job was playing a trail boss on radio. You know, that special kind of speech that Easterners think Westerners actually speak: all about “critters” and “dudes,” and how we’re going to “canter over to LA.” 

It was going to be five bleak hours of discomfort.

But the good news is passengers won’t have to endure seats much longer. Coming to an airline near you: standing room only and meat hooks for safety belts. — For InsideSources

Let’s Honor the ‘Thing’ of the Year

by Leave a Comment

By Llewellyn King

Many publications, following the lead of Time, name a “Person of the Year.” This year, Time chose German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

According to Time, the criteria to be chosen is “the person or persons who most affected the news and our lives, for good or ill, and embodied what was important about the year.”

So at this year’s end, I think it is time for those who make those choices to add a co-equal category: things. Things change everything. They have throughout history, but with increasing rapidity in the last 150 years. And they do it more dramatically now than ever before.

The magazine’s first “Person of the Year” (actually, back then it was “Man of the Year”) was Charles Lindbergh in 1927. He was hailed for his first solo flight across the Atlantic Ocean on May 20-21 that year.

Huge and brave as Lindbergh’s flight was, it was the airplane not the man, that changed aviation.

People change the way we live, but so do things. We now talk about the “Internet of Things,” where our home and work machines are all connected to the Internet. With this connectivity, a farmer will plow his fields from the local diner; and Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s founder and CEO, will have his drones ring the doorbell when they deposit parcels.

The unfolding political year will have much sound and fury. Candidates will promise that if elected, they will change the country for the better. Yet technology might change us more. Ergo, we should have a “Thing of the Year.”

I hereby declare the Internet as the “Thing of 2015.”

Why now? Because this was the first year we stopped being aghast at the changes the Internet is bringing about and simply accepted them as a reality — just as 100 years ago, the automobile went from being a novelty to being part of the fabric of life.

This Christmas was the “Internet Christmas.” We bought more from Web retailers than ever before, and did not marvel at it. It is just “the way we live now.”

For holiday greetings, the Internet began to beat out traditional cards sent in the mail. E-mailing your greetings is less labor intensive, and easier to personalize. Next year, expect more e-cards. If I worked at Hallmark, I would be pushing for additional electronic products before cards become another quaint piece of Americana on display at the Smithsonian, like rotary dial telephones.

I have not welcomed the Internet over the years. I like things the way they were. But this year was seminal for me: I decided the Internet, even the “Internet of Things,” was OK.

Particularly, I like the way the Internet reaches out to the sick, the shut-ins, the truly lonely and the homesick. I can send Christmas greetings to family and friends in Austria, England, South Africa and Vietnam, as I have, from a little device balanced on my lap. Wow!

Yes, with the Internet, you and I can fly across the Atlantic faster than Lindbergh could gun his throttle.

Here are some things that might change your life more than any political figure in the year ahead:

1. A prototype of a driverless car may zoom down a test track.

2. Home 3D printing will spread — so if you break something, you can make a new one.

3. All your appliances and gadgets will start speaking to each other: Using your cell phone, you will be able to defrost a steak in your home refrigerator while you are at work; or you will be able to get a diagnosis by taking a selfie of your inflamed eye.

4. Your electricity may be generated on the roof of your house, and a robot may make your bed.

5. A whole new generation of rockets will offer space rides,

6. New materials, only one-atom-thick, may enable you to fold up your television set and put it in your pocket.

Forget the politicians. Better ask the “things” what is in store; they are starting to talk to each other, and I do not want to be left out of the society of things. — For InsideSources

The Efficient, Stupid Market for Nuclear Electricity

by Leave a Comment

By Llewellyn King

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

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

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

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

End of the line

End of the line

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In Search of the Real Elizabeth Warren

by Leave a Comment

By Llewellyn King

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

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

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

Here’s a sampling:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Rare Promise of Thorium Reactors

by 4 Comments

By Llewellyn King

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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