White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

The U.S. Commands the Heights of Science — for Now

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Pull up the drawbridge, flood the moat and drop the portcullis. That, it would seem, is the science and research policy of the United States circa 2025.

The problem with a siege policy is that eventually the inhabitants in the castle will starve.

Current actions across the board suggest that starvation may become the fate of American global scientific leadership. Leadership which has dazzled the world for more than a century. Leadership which has benefited not just Americans but all of humanity with inventions ranging from communications to transportation, to medicine, to entertainment.

An American president might have gone to the United Nations and said, “As we the people of America have given so much to the world, from disease suppression to the wonder of the internet, we should expect understanding when we ask of you what is very little.”

This imaginary president might have added, “The United Nations is a body of diverse people, and we are a nation of diverse people.

“We have been a magnet for the talent of the world from the creation of this nation.

“We are also a sharing nation. We have shared with the world financially and technologically. Above all, we have shared our passion for democracy, our respect for the individual and his or her human rights.

“At the center of our ability to be munificent is our scientific muscle.”

This president might also have wanted to dwell on how immigrant talent has melded with native genius to propel and keep America at the zenith of human achievement — and keep it there for so long, envied, admired and imitated.

He might have mentioned how a surge of immigrants from Hitler’s Germany gave us movie dominance that has lasted nearly 100 years. He might have highlighted the energy that immigrants bring with them; their striving is a powerful dynamic.

He might have said that striving has shaped the American ethos and was behind Romania-born Nikola Tesla, South Africa-born Elon Musk or India-born and China-born engineers who are propelling the United States leadership in artificial intelligence. The genius behind Nvidia? Taiwan-born Jensen Huang.

I have been reporting on AI for about a decade — well before ChatGPT exploded on the scene on Nov. 30, 2022. All I can tell you is wherever I have gone, from MIT to NASA, engineers from all over the world are all over the science of AI.

The story is simple: Talent will out, and talent will find its way to America.

At least that was the story. Now the Trump administration, with its determination to exclude the foreign-born — to go after foreign students in U.S. universities and to make employers pay $100,000 for a new H-1B visa — is to guarantee that talent will go somewhere else, maybe Britain, France, Germany or China and India. Where the talent goes, so goes the future.

So goes America’s dominant scientific leadership.

At a meeting at an AI startup in New York, all the participants were recent immigrants, and we fell to discussing why so much talent came to the United States. The collective answer was freedom, mobility and reverence for research.

That was a year ago. I doubt the answers would be as enthusiastic and volubly pro-American today.

The British Empire was built on technological dominance, from the marine chronometer to the rifled gun barrel to steam technology.

America’s global leadership has been built, along with its wealth, on technology, from Ford’s production line to DuPont’s chemicals.

Technology needs funding, talent and passion (the striving factor). We have led the world with those for decades. Now that is in the balance.

President Donald Trump could make America even greater: beat cancer, go to Mars, and harness AI for human good.

Those would be a great start. To do it, fund research and attract talent. Keep the castle of America open.

The Efficient, Stupid Market for Nuclear Electricity

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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