Will New U. S. Nuclear Plants Be Safe and Cost-Effective?

That's a question a lot of people are asking as the field of nuclear-powered electricity attempts a comeback in the U. S.  An article in the MIT Technology Review examines some critical issues that will affect the answers to that question. 

 

U. S. nuclear power has had a checkered career.  Beginning in the 1950s, nuclear power plants were built by the leading nuclear-bomb-making countries:  the old Soviet Union, England, and the U. S.  A building boom in the U. S. for nuclear plants peaked in the late 1970s, and some years since then, as much as 20% of total U. S. power came from nuclear sources.  However, after about 2000, with cost overruns and bad publicity such as the accidents at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania in 1979 and Chernobyl, Ukraine in 1986, utilities quit planning new plants, and shut down several old ones. 

 

But with the rising concerns about climate change, nuclear power plants began to look better for the environment than fossil-fuel plants.  They also have a huge advantage over most renewable sources such as wind and solar, which are subject to the vagaries of nightfall and wind speed.  A properly-run nuclear plant can be an extremely reliable source, stabilizing a grid with renewables that might otherwise run out of energy on a still, dark night.

 

The Technology Review article points out some problems in getting a new nuclear-power industry started.  The fuel, for instance, is typically something called "high-assay low-enriched uranium" (HALEU for short).  It has between 5% and 25% U-235, the highly-fissionable isotope of uranium which makes fission plants using uranium workable.  Right now, the only source of new HALEU is Russia, although the U. S. government has a stockpile that it's currently doling out to experimental plants.  This issue needs to be resolved before new conventional nuclear plants go online here in a major way.

 

Another issue is safety.  While avoiding publicity, the Trump administration has relaxed some safety and security measures and environmental regulations pertaining to nuclear plants.  One can argue that excessive regulation and time-consuming permitting processes were big factors in putting the kibosh on nuclear in the first place.  But regulations are like preparing for war, in that you never know whether you did an inadequate job until something bad happens, and by then it's too late.  Time will tell whether the new regulation situation will merely speed up the construction of new plants or lead to problems with safety.  And unlike fossil-fuel plants, cleaning up a nuclear-plant accident can be orders of magnitude more expensive and dangerous, as we learned from the Fukushima nuclear-plant accident in 2011.

 

Finally, will new nuclear plants make a profit for their investors, or will they turn into financial albatrosses that bankrupt their owners, as has happened in the past with reactor projects that went way over budget?  One measure of how attractive nuclear plants are compared to other kinds is the cost per installed kilowatt.  Fossil-fuel plants can be built for around $1600 per kilowatt or less.  China reportedly builds their nuclear plants for between $2,000 and $3,000 per kilowatt.  Estimates for the various types of new U. S. nuclear plants vary, but figures between $6,000 and $10,000 per kilowatt seem realistic for the first new advanced models.  The price could come down if the nuclear industry learns to standardize models rather than building each plant from scratch, which practice has contributed to cost overruns in the past.  But going to a standardized model will require changes in the regulatory environment which may or may not come to pass.

 

Here in Texas, startup reactor builder Last Energy has teamed with Texas A&M University to build a 5-megawatt pressurized-water reactor at the RELLIS campus, a former air force base ten miles away from the main campus in Bryan-College Station.  News releases predict the facility will go critical in the summer of 2026, which is ambitious but possible.  The pressurized-water reactor design is not innovative, having been used for the first nuclear-powered submarines in the 1950s.  But with modern construction and control techniques, designers may be able to build on the decades of experience gained with the design to produce a standardized module that can be scaled up fairly easily to commercial size, in the 20-megawatt or larger range.

 

Newer designs are also in the works.  Some designs use boiling water rather than pressurized liquid water, and this simplifies the design.  Other designs use liquid metals for coolants, fuel in pebble rather than rod form, and other variations on the conventional design.  But there is a long road between experiments and a commercially profitable plant, and many previously-announced plans for smaller modular plants have been cancelled. 

 

Nevertheless, if some new designs can be shown to work safely and not cost an arm and a leg during the current administration's fairly favorable regulatory environment for nuclear power, the industry could make a substantial contribution toward the nation's energy needs, which have recently soared due to the boom in data-center construction. 

 

Building nuclear plants to run data centers is not going to appeal to your typical activist, and there are downsides to nuclear energy, notably the problem of waste.  Some of the newly proposed reactor schemes generate much less waste than conventional U-235 reactors, but again, these are only proposals, not working reactors.  The current policy in the U. S. of keeping waste stored locally rather than transporting it and concentrating it at one big waste facility seems to be working so far.  But "so far" compared to the dangerous centuries-long lifetime of nuclear waste is not very long, and it would be better if we could produce less waste to start with rather than making lots of it and figuring out what to do with it afterwards.

 

The next couple or three years may be a make-or-break time for nuclear power in the U. S.  From many points of view, it is a sensible and proven way to generate electricity.  If we can adjust the regulatory environment and adapt to new modular manufacturing techniques without compromising safety, nuclear power could make a climate-friendly and reliable contribution to our future energy needs.  But that is currently a big "if," and only time will tell us whether hopes for a more-nuclear future will be justified or dashed.

 

Sources:  The MIT Technology Review article I referred to, "Three Questions About Next-Generation Nuclear Power, Answered," appears at https://www.technologyreview.com/2026/02/05/1132197/nuclear-questions/.  I also referred to the website https://www.nei.org/resources/statistics/us-nuclear-generating-statistics for statistics on nuclear power and the sites https://news.tamus.edu/stories/last-energy-texas-am-collaborate-to-launch-microreactor-pilot-at-texas-am-rellis/and https://www.neimagazine.com/news/last-energy-funded-for-pwr-5-pilot/?cf-view for information on the Texas A&M 5-megawatt RELLIS unit.

 

Tesla Smart Summon App May Not Be

. . . all that smart, that is.

 

Say you're a well-off single twenty-something guy with a brand-new Tesla and you read the following on your car's control screen:

 

"Buckle up for the ride of your life, except, surprise!  You're not in the car.  ASS (Actually Smart Summon) allows your vehicle to come to you, or head to a spot that you choose, all on its own.  It's like magic, but with more tech and less wand-waving."

 

What's not to like?  Imagine leaving a bar with your date and saying, "Watch this," and pressing the ASS button—on the phone, that is.  And your new Tesla just quietly leaves its space in the parking lot and pulls up next to you.  How cool is that?

 

And how likely are you to follow the fine print on the instruction screen to the letter, which reads in part "Keep an eye on your car and its surroundings at all times.  Stay vigilant, especially around the fast and the furious (people, bikes, and other cars)."  No, you're more likely to be lapping up the adulation from your date. 

 

So when the U. S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) received a complaint about a crash involving a Tesla under Actually Smart Summon control, it started looking around and found several other similar incidents in media reports, a total of twelve malfunctions that it is currently investigating.

 

Part of the problem is that the NHTSA has told Tesla to report directly to them any crashes on "publicly accessible roads" that involve autonomous operation of its vehicles.  The Summon software has an internal interlock that prevents it being used on public streets, and it's intended only for parking lots and driveways.  This leads to a debate about what "publicly accessible" means.  If you have a gate at the bottom of your driveway, it's not publicly accessible.  But what if there's no gate, or the gate is open?  I'd say most ungated parking lots for retail and commercial enterprises are publicly accessible.  It looks like Tesla hasn't been entirely forthcoming to the NHTSA, assuming in the first place that they knew about some of the incidents.  And considering how intimately the software of every Tesla is tied to corporate HQ, I suspect they had the data at their fingertips.

 

The Associated Press story about this latest kerfuffle between the NHTSA and Tesla reminds us that in the past, Elon Musk, Tesla's CEO, has complained that the regulatory agency is stifling progress in autonomous driving technology.  There is speculation that once the Trump administration is in charge of all executive-branch agencies such as the NHTSA, Musk, who donated heavily to Trump's campaign and was appointed to a government-improvement board, will pressure the NHTSA to lay off Tesla, in short. 

 

How much regulation is too much?  It depends on who you ask:  the companies that are regulated, or the people who benefit from regulations.

 

Just to pick a historical example, ask any member of the families of the so-called "radium girls" who spent eight hours a day in the 1920s painting radium dials on watches and clocks, came down with radiation poisoning, and died horrible deaths.  The use of radium was not regulated at all back then, and the radium girls paid the price. 

 

On the other hand, a classic case of "rent-seeking," which means a firm that uses government regulation to create a monopoly or other favorable business environment for itself, came about for most of the twentieth century in the U. S. when Ma Bell (American Telephone and Telegraph) regulated away virtually all other telecomm companies except for a few harmless local enterprises here and there.  In retrospect, this over-regulation stifled competition and slowed technological advance to a crawl until antitrust lawsuits broke up the monopoly and led to the explosion of telecomm services and smartphone apps that we (mostly) enjoy today. 

 

There are two extremes to think about.  The same AP article mentions that Tesla suffered its first decline in sales in a decade last year.  Could this be a sign that regulatory burdens are losing Tesla business?  I doubt it.  There are so many other factors involved—Chinese competition in electric vehicles, the continuing high prices of EVs compared to gasoline-powered cars, even political factors (I'm sure there are some people who will refuse to buy a Tesla simply because Musk hangs out with Trump)—that blaming a sales decline on regulatory pressure is implausible.

 

Musk has a well-earned reputation for playing fast and loose with bureaucracies and their spawn, namely regulations.  This attitude on the part of a radical innovator is understandable.  Technical innovation frequently gets ahead of the law, in that it creates situations that are unprecedented and nobody has had the time to figure out what laws to pass regarding them.  Musk seems to believe that it's easier to get forgiveness in retrospect than permission in advance, and there is some truth to that.

 

On the other hand, he also seems to think that telling people to be careful absolves him and his company of responsibility if a Tesla driver disobeys instructions.  Many crashes involving the "self-driving" features of Teslas have happened because, in direct contradiction to instructions telling drivers to keep their hands on the wheel and be prepared to take over if something unusual happens, the drivers have been doing things like watching videos on their phones. 

 

It's possible something similar is happening with the Summons features.  Besides the Actually Smart Summons, there is a Dumb Summons that lets you manually drive the car like a giant radio-controlled toy, and that obviously requires you to pay full attention to what you're doing and watch the four-camera display on your phone while you're doing it.  But the NHTSA is concerned about latency issues and how fast the car can go in this mode, as it looks like remote-control drivers may not have had enough time to avoid obstacles such as other parked cars and bollards (those traffic-preventing posts mounted in the ground).

 

My two cents on this is that the NHTSA is doing about right in not taking drastic action such as banning all Teslas from the road, but not ignoring new problems as they surface in complaints and media reports either.  The NHTSA will continue to spotlight problems with Teslas, and Musk will continue to gripe that they're overdoing it, and life will go on. 

 

And maybe the people making up acronyms at Tesla for the next new app will be a little more careful about what it spells.  I spent five minutes trying to think of how I could incorporate ASS in my headline, but finally took the high road and left it out.  Not everybody else will, though.

 

Sources:  An Associated Press article published on Jan. 7, 2025 entitled "US opens another Tesla probe, latest focused on tech that remotely returns car to driver," appeared at https://apnews.com/article/tesla-investigation-safety-autonomous-death-a158e4dee7b5e94b148ec3bb5c47233d.  I obtained the instruction quotes from a screenshot contained in a short video demonstrating the ASS app at https://www.youtube.com/shorts/RmVk-0LlDMI. 

A Fatal Ammonia-Tanker Crash in Illinois

 

Around 5 p. m. on Friday, Sept. 29, a wreck on Interstate 70 between Effingham and Teutopolis, Illinois caused authorities to divert traffic from the interstate onto the older Route 40 that goes directly through the two towns.  Farming is the main business in that region, and among the vehicles diverted onto Route 40 that evening was a tanker truck carrying 7,500 gallons of anhydrous ammonia, which is a popular form of nitrogen fertilizer.

 

At 9:25 p. m., the truck overturned in a multiple-vehicle collision which is still being investigated by the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB).  Because of the large toxic plume of ammonia that resulted, first responders evacuated about 500 people from northeast Teutopolis overnight, allowing them to return late Saturday.  Once rescuers were able to access the scene, it was found that five people had died, including two children under 12.  It was not clear at this writing whether the victims died of ammonia inhalation or from effects of the crash itself, but five survivors were taken to a local hospital as well.

 

Every day, hundreds of ammonia tankers travel between distribution points on their way to supplying farmers with what many consider to be an essential and economical fertilizer.  Ammonia gas, which consists of one atom of nitrogen and three of hydrogen, is a colorless acrid-smelling substance that boils at 28 below zero Fahrenheit.  (The household bottles of ammonia that can be found in grocery stores are actually weak solutions of the gas in water.)  Before Fritz Haber developed a high-pressure process to synthesize ammonia directly from hydrogen and nitrogen in the air around 1910, ammonia was obtained mainly by distilling animal urine, a messy and expensive job at best.  After World War II-era chemical plants found themselves with an overcapacity of ammonia plants once the war ended, the price dropped to the point that direct injection of the gas into soil at a depth of six inches or more became a fast and economical means of applying nitrogen fertilizer.  Since then, an entire anhydrous-ammonia infrastructure has grown up to deliver the substance to millions of acres of farmland, usually without incident.

 

But every now and then something goes wrong, as it did last week in Teutopolis.  Despite the best efforts of mechanical designers to make tanker trucks safe, collisions can sever connecting pipes and cause leaks, which is apparently what happened last Friday.  Ammonia as a gas is lighter than air, but if enough is released near the ground it will form a suffocating cloud that cannot be seen.  This is why the authorities took the prudent precaution of evacuating part of Teutopolis once the nature of the accident became clear. 

 

In addition to being toxic at concentrations above a few parts per million, ammonia is explosive when present at air concentrations higher than about 15%.  So if you escape being suffocated by it, you could instead be blown to bits. 

 

It's surprising that there aren't more accidents involving anhydrous ammonia, but when it is used in properly designed equipment by trained operators who know how dangerous it is, it can be transported safely all the way from the factory to the soil, where it is quickly absorbed by complex chemicals and biological materials and becomes available to fuel plant growth. 

 

At the same time, it is a highly unnatural process characterized by many features that we associate with modern industrial culture:  large-scale concentrations of products, complex distribution networks, and use in largely monoculture farms (all corn or all wheat, for example).  All these things go against the grain (so to speak) of the small-farming idea that each farm should be its own ecosystem, recycling manure to the soil, which grows the food for the animals, and so on. 

 

For whatever reason, we as a culture seem to be happy with (or at least blissfully unaware of) the forces and compromises involved in the kind of industrial-scale agriculture that we have.  The cheapest food, if externalities such as ammonia accidents are ignored, will always be the mass-produced type made with the minimum amount of labor using the largest economies of scale.  But externalities are not nothing, and the problems that large-scale agriculture causes, ranging from pollution to alleged animal cruelty to obesity, don't often have dollar prices attached to them. 

 

If we were losing hundreds of people a year in anhydrous-ammonia accidents, the issue might come into public consciousness to the extent that some might at least question the propriety of fertilizing plants this way.  But as it is, such mishaps are so unusual as to be newsworthy in themselves.  While it is tragic any time anybody is killed, we may find that the people who lost their lives in this accident were killed by the consequences of the collision itself and not the ammonia that was released afterwards.  Either way, it seems that we as a nation are willing to accept some hazards—namely, having tons of anhydrous ammonia rolling around on highways and railroads—in exchange for the advantages that the process confers on farming.

 

I recently read a book with a title that my wife remarked was one of the longest for a non-fiction book she's seen:  The End is Near And It's Going To Be Awesome:  How Going Broke Will Leave America Richer, Happier, and More Secure.  Its author, Kevin Williamson, has a background in economics, but he's not one of these wonky numbers-only types who reduces every human to a rational utility optimizer.  His main point is that when society wants to do something, the best way to do it is for interested people to get together and figure it out for themselves.  Only as a last resort should we invoke the power of politics to pass laws about the issue.  The reason is that law is a blunt instrument that is usually wielded by the powerful to exploit the less powerful, and no matter how well-intended the action is to start with, the effect usually ends up making the strong better off at the expense of the less fortunate.

 

So while we await the results of the Teutopolis accident investigation, let's hope it doesn't lead to a call for new regulations on the anhydrous-ammonia industry.  From all appearances, that enterprise seems to be handling things pretty well on its own, and I hope the tank-truck makers learn from this accident how to prevent more like it in the future.

 

Sources:  I referred to articles on the Teutopolis accident at https://www.cnn.com/2023/09/30/us/illinois-anhydrous-ammonia-leak/index.html

and https://abc7chicago.com/teutopolis-fatal-crash-evacuation-anhydrous-leak-ammonia/13847580/.  Kevin D. Williamson's The End is Near And It's Going To Be Awesome was published in 2013 by HarperCollins.

Prudence, Justice, Democracy, and Technocracy

 

In the June 12 issue of National Review, writer Noah Rothman takes aim at the web of intrusive regulations that, as the Lilliputians tried to bind Gulliver with hundreds of strings, try to micromanage our personal lives with regard to the kinds of technologies we use around the house.  In recent years, the following well-established items have become targets for government regulation above and beyond the usual safety concerns:  incandescent light bulbs, gas stoves, gas water heaters, air conditioners, lawn mowers, and even paper bags and plastic straws. 

 

Any attempt to elucidate a coherent motivation behind these regulations, which emerge from all levels of government (city, state, and federal), tends to end in confusion.  Various reasons are given ranging from suspicious increases in childhood asthma for gas stoves, to air and noise pollution from gasoline-powered lawn mowers, to alleged environmental harms from plastic straws.  None of the regulators claim that any of these technologies are bad because they are directly responsible for the deaths or injuries of those who use them (although people have died in fires caused by gas stoves and cut off their fingers with lawnmowers).  The harm is always more remote:  vague and poorly-implemented studies showing correlation between asthma and the use of gas ranges, increased levels of environmental pollution that are so small as to be negligible, or the ever-present excuse of climate change. 

 

As Rothman points out, neglected in all these calculations by the regulators are the inconveniences, or worse, placed on the consumer by the byproducts of regulation.  LED lighting costs more than old-fashioned incandescent lighting.  This is a clear burden on poor people.  Some kinds of cooking are hard or impossible to do with electric or induction ranges, which also cost more to operate in many locales than gas ranges do.  In the name of various vague political causes, then, the regulators ask the much larger number of ordinary citizens to endure a set of individually slight inconveniences, which however add up to a considerable burden if totaled over the entire U. S. 

 

If we look at this situation from an ethical point of view, two cardinal virtues come to mind:  justice and prudence.  Justice sees that each person gets what is coming to him or her, in either a nice way or a not-so-nice way.  Prudence is a sort of all-around virtue of balancing various factors so that justice is served.  In a democracy, both of these virtues should be possessed by the body politic so that whatever is democratically enacted embodies them. 

 

Before the era of micro-managing regulations, all of the technologies mentioned above were adopted not because they were politically correct, but because enterprising inventors and manufacturers developed them in response to needs and wants of the public.  And the public went for them without any help from government.  In the name of prudence, certain basic safety regulations and voluntary schemes such as the Underwriters Laboratory label were put in place to ensure that direct harm from these technologies was kept to an acceptably low level, but that was it as far as regulation is concerned.

 

However, there is another philosophy of government that is more or less opposed to democracy, and that is technocracy:  rule by experts.  In this view, the great unwashed masses are too ignorant to choose domestic technologies wisely, and need to be guided by their elitely-educated masters into the path of enlightenment.  Exactly which path that is depends on the expert, so in practice the regulation that is enacted depends on just who grabs the levers of power in the increasingly complex web of bureaucracies that we live under today.  This probably explains the geographically diverse nature of these regulations:  what's fine in Nevada may be banned in California and vice versa, depending on which technocrat is running the show. 

 

Both prudence and justice are violated when an ideologue imposes his idiosyncratic whims on a large group of citizens who have been minding their own business.  Whatever allegedly meritorious political goal is served by the regulation is usually far outweighed by the sum of small (or not so small) inconveniences suffered by those who are regulated.  Voluntary suffering and privation, as many citizens did to sacrifice consumer products during World War II, is one thing.  But to have it imposed on you in the absence of a national emergency is both unwise (imprudent) and unfair (unjust).

 

Rothman ends his article in the hope that voters will turn to the ballot box to alleviate some of the ills imposed by bureaucratic micro-regulation of technologies which have proved both popular and safe, by and large.  Unfortunately, the same diffuseness that marks the regulations (small harms caused to a lot of people) means that such matters are unlikely to become dominant issues in political campaigns.  I doubt that even the most progressive candidates have made banning gas stoves a major plank in their platforms. 

 

The most we can hope for in this regard is that one party or the other will take up the cause of pushing back against rule by technocrats in general, and a vote for that party will work against the creeping regulations that threaten to deprive us of things that work just fine, thank you.  While this might work on the national level, the entrenched nature of local politics, especially in large cities and certain states, means that there are only limited hopes in this direction. 

 

Sometimes other types of public-relations actions can have effects all out of proportion to their actual size.  I think of Mahatma Gandhi's famous Salt March of 1930, which publicized the Indian populace's opposition to the British monopoly on salt production.  Salt was something everybody used and had to pay for, and the British unfairly prevented Indian citizens from making it themselves, no doubt using reasons of sanitation and quality to justify their injustice.  After the arrest of some 60,000 protesters, Gandhi was able to negotiate with the British leaders for the right to make salt by ordinary citizens, and the march was a success.

 

I don't know how effective a lawnmower march on a state capital would be, but I'm sure it would garner some publicity.  When ordinary democratic means either fail or are unavailable, more unorthodox ways should be tried.  But the best thing is to re-establish both a working democratic system, and a populace who will not stand for any nonsense.

 

Sources:  The article by Noah Rothman "The War on Things That Work" appeared in the June 12, 2023 issue of National Review, pp. 21-24.  I also referred to an article on the Gandhi-Irwin Pact at https://www.britannica.com/event/Gandhi-Irwin-Pact.

 

Facebook, Privacy, and Regulation

In what may signal a change in attitude, the U. S. Federal Trade Commission is talking about fining Facebook billions of dollars for breaching a privacy agreement between the company and the FTC.  At issue is how Facebook uses the data it gleans from its users and whether Facebook has asked permission before sharing private data with third parties. 

In a recent AP article, reporter Barbara Ortutay says Facebook has set aside $3 billion in case the FTC fines the firm.  This is somewhat of a drop in the bucket of Facebook profits, which are estimated to be over $20 billion this year.  But still, it's large enough to attract investors' attention, and so the publicly traded company mentioned it in a recent news release. 

Privacy is one of the more nebulous concepts in ethics and law, as opposed to murder, say.  With murder you generally have a dead body and a definite event that produced it.  But privacy is all in the mind, or rather, minds—the mind of the person whose privacy has been violated, and the minds of those who allegedly know something about the victim that the victim doesn't want known.  And figuring out what is in peoples' minds isn't that easy.

One of the earliest institutional guarantees of privacy is what the Roman Catholic Church calls the "seal of confession."  Catholics are supposed to confess all their mortal sins periodically to a priest in what's called the sacrament of penance or reconciliation.  In turn, the Church promises on behalf of its priests never to reveal what is confessed.  A priest who breaks the seal of confession is subject to immediate defrocking, and so some priests have become martyrs rather than reveal secrets they learned in the confessional to government agencies, for example. 

There are many differences between confessing one's sins to a priest and posting your latest trip to a bar on Facebook, but structurally the situations are similar.  In each case, there is a person who is providing information that they would like to keep private:  the penitent in the confessional, or the person posting something on Facebook.  There is also the desired audience which the person wants to reach:  the priest (and presumably God) in the confessional, the intended circle of chosen friends in the case of Facebook.  There is the institution whose job it is to ensure that privacy is maintained:  the Church in the one case and Facebook in the other.  And finally, there's everybody else—the rest of the world which is supposed to remain wholly ignorant of what is going on in the private interchanges between priest and penitent in the one case, or Facebook and the user in the other case.

There have been isolated cases in which the seal of confession has been broken, but they have been rare, probably owing to the drastic penalty the Church exacts on a priest who breaks the seal.  In the case of Facebook, things are much different.  For one thing, individual users have no sure way of knowing if Facebook shares their private information with advertisers.  So it's reasonable that another institution with enough resources to investigate such large-scale questions systematically should get involved, in this case the FTC.  Instead of the seal of confession, we have a 2011 agreement reached between the FTC and Facebook which bound the company for twenty years to ask for "affirmative express consent" before Facebook shares any data the user hasn't made public with a third party.

Here's where things get tricky.  Anyone who deals with computers knows that whenever you sign up with a new service or install new software, you get asked to consent to something that most people blow by without reading.  If you try reading the terms and conditions, as they're called, you will either waste hours on it or have to hire a lawyer to figure out what you're really committing to.  This digital equivalent of fine print on a written contract is where companies like Facebook sometimes try to bury things you may not like if you knew about them.  But the case the FTC has against Facebook may amount to something like in clause 4 of paragraph 3.7A, you actually agreed to let Facebook share what you thought was private data with anybody who will pay for it. 

The question of whether clicking a button that says you read and understood the terms and conditions without really doing that is "affirmative express consent" has two answers.  The technical answer is, yes, it does, and if you didn't read and understand all that legal boilerplate it's your own fault.  The practical and man-on-the-street answer is, no it doesn't, because nobody but a corporate lawyer getting $300 an hour for the job is going to read and understand all that stuff in the sense that is intended, and making ordinary non-lawyers press the button is simply a CYA (cover-your-afterparts) action on the part of the company.  And the FTC may be saying that Facebook hasn't been covering well enough.

I do not personally use Facebook, although my wife does and lets me know if she finds anything important on it that she thinks I ought to know.  As I said to begin with, privacy is a fuzzy concept which in the digital age we live in has come to mean different things to different people.  Younger people especially seem not to mind sharing things on public sites that forty or fifty years ago would have been confined to the privacy of one's diary kept under lock and key.  I suppose the best we can do is to make clear what users expect in the way of privacy, in terms that users themselves can understand, and then use government regulation if necessary to keep organizations like Facebook from abusing the trust that their users place in them.  And if it takes billion-dollar fines to get a company's attention, then I say go to it. 

Sources:  The AP article by Barbara Ortutay about the potential Facebook fine was carried by numerous news outlets, including the print edition of the Austin American-Statesman on Apr. 26, 2019, where I saw it.  One online location that is not protected by a pay-to-get-behind-it firewall (an increasingly common practice these days) where the article can be viewed is the website of West Virginia's Bluefield Daily Telegraph at https://www.bdtonline.com/region/possible-b-facebook-fine-echoes-european-tech-penalties/article_6c3bfa1d-9d83-58b3-8417-08fc8688ccd4.html. 

Microsoft Puts NewsGuard On Duty

At beaches and pools you'll sometimes see a notice that reads "Lifeguard On Duty," or more often, "No Lifeguard On Duty—Swim At Your Own Risk."  Recently Microsoft, originator of the Edge mobile browser, started including a feature in it called NewsGuard.  The user must activate it, but once he or she does, every news site that's been rated by NewsGuard (about 2000 so far) gets either a green checkmark or a red exclamation point.  Green means the site has passed enough of the nine criteria NewsGuard uses to assess credibility and transparency to meet with their approval.  And of course, red means the site flunked.  The example NewsGuard uses of a site that flunks is RT.com, which is operated by Russia but doesn't make that fact exactly obvious. 

The fact that such an influential organization as Microsoft thought it was a good idea to include this third-party app (NewsGuard is an independent operation based in New York City) says something about the anxiety that tech and social media companies feel concerning the issues of fake news, divisiveness, and related matters. 

Reasons for this are not hard to find.  As we learned how Russia tried to influence the 2016 elections with fake social media accounts, we were bombarded with tweets from the Oval Office saying all sorts of things, some of which were actually true.  When Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg was called before Congress last spring concerning misuse of Facebook data by the research firm Cambridge Analytica, he appeared out of his depth when he was asked about the finer points of free speech and what his firm's responsibilities were with regard to spreading disinformation and falsehoods, as well as selling information on users that could be used in politically suspect ways.

On its own website, NewsGuard boasts that it employs "professional journalists," not algorithms, to evaluate news sites.  These journalists presumably sit around a table and debate whether a given site is hiding its true source of financing, for example (not always an easy thing to determine), or whether the news that shows up on it can be verified by independent and multiple sources.  This is nothing more than good journalism, or what used to be called good journalism.  In an era when the word "viral" means something good, at least when it comes to news, "good" often substitutes for "popular," but there's a big difference.

Here's where the philosopher's distinction between "objective" and "subjective" comes in handy.  We have a sense that objective news is better than subjective news, but there's a problem with that.  As the late Mortimer Adler wrote, "We call something objective when it is the same for me, for you, and for anyone else.  We call something subjective when it differs from one individual to another and when it is exclusively the possession of one individual and of no one else."  By that criterion, there aren't that many objective news reports anywhere.  Pictures of a solar eclipse, maybe—obituaries, at least with regard to the facts about a death.  But maybe the late So-and-So was a nice person to you, but a real SOB to others.  Was he a nice guy or not?  That's subjective, as is most of the news reported by even the most sober and responsible journalists, unless it's C-Span-type relaying of an event without any selection, editing, or other intervention by a third party.

So, saying some news sites are objective and others are subjective wouldn't get us very far.  Instead, NewsGuard falls back on the distinction between truth and falsehood, and relies on sources other than the site itself to reveal falsehood.  But of course, those sources may not get it right either, whatever "right" means.  The upshot of all this is that if you, as a NewsGuard evaluator of a website, find that most people and institutions you trust say that a thing is false or misleading, you're going to decide it's false or misleading, and you'll give that site a red "do not trust" rating.

The fear in some circles is that a liberal or other systematic bias may reveal itself in the ways that NewsGuard rates sites.  And I'm sure that something like this will happen.  Already RT.com has run a story saying that NewsGuard is "controversial."  It's understandable that the site used by NewsGuard itself on its own website as an example of a red-rated source, complains about the red rating. 

The deeper question is whether the NewsGuard feature will make any difference to users.  The hope is that the hapless passive consumer of news, who formerly was suckered into believing all kinds of claptrap, will now see the red rating on his favorite sites and will turn over a new leaf, avoiding places like Breitbart and the Drudge Report and becoming a more enlightened and useful citizen and voter. 

To some, that's a hope.  To others, that's a fear, which is why many news sources whose common characteristics are hard to discern, but may generally be classed as conservative (with exceptions), have expressed concern that the wide availaibility of NewsGuard will lead to some sort of discrimination against them. 

If it's a problem, it's not one that I would personally spend a lot of sleepless nights over.  For one thing, NewsGuard doesn't keep you from viewing a site.  It just tells you that there may be problems with it, and details the problems.  In that sense, it's just a kind of fact-checker or background-provider, and I see no particular harm in that. 

As long as using NewsGuard is voluntary, and as long as its ratings, or something similar, don't acquire the force of compulsion or law and succeed in banning sites altogether, it seems to me that the app can do more good than harm.  Of course, I haven't bothered to check whether they're rating my site, but I doubt that it's one of the top 2000 news sources that NewsGuard has inspected.  We try to tell the truth here, but most readers know this blog mixes opinion with facts.  For those who can't tell the difference, maybe NewsGuard will help.

Sources:  I referred to the NewsGuard website at https://www.newsguardtech.com/ and their nine criteria at https://www.newsguardtech.com/ratings/criteria-for-and-explanation-of-ratings/.  I also viewed the RT story on NewsGuard at https://www.rt.com/news/449530-newsguard-edge-browser-media-integrated/ and the Wikipedia article on NewsGuard.  The quote by Mortimer Adler is from his Ten Philosophical Mistakes (New York:  Collier, 1985), p. 9.

Injecting Some Sense Into Fracking Regulation

The July issue of Scientific American carried the best summary of the fracking-earthquake controversy I have seen so far.  "Drilling For Earthquakes" by Anna Kuchment reviews the fracking (hydraulic fracturing), the associated water injection, the earthquakes, the science, and government reactions to the problem.  In particular, the article shows the very different approaches the states of Texas and Oklahoma have taken to the problem.  And I regret to say it doesn't make my native state of Texas look good by comparison.  But first, the basics.

As I wrote in this space in 2013, water-injection wells to dispose of the brackish water that comes up sometimes along with oil and gas are nothing new.  But the combination of fracking to extract fossil fuels from previously inaccessible formations, horizontal drilling to gain wider access to those formations, and the boom of widespread deployment of these techniques that has gone on in the last six or eight years, have led to a huge increase in the volume of water injected back deep underground.  During 2014, in Texas a gallon of water was injected back into the ground for every 100 or so cubic feet of shale gas extracted.  That may not sound like much, but Texas produced about 4 trillion (4,000,000,000,000) cubic feet of shale gas that year.  Leave off two zeroes and that's how many gallons of water were injected back into the ground.  And that ratio probably holds true more or less for the rest of the country as well.

Wastewater injection from fracking doesn't always cause earthquakes.  North Dakota has had a lot of fracking and wastewater injection too, but hardly any earthquakes.  On the other hand, Oklahoma, a place that was hardly famous for earthquakes before 2005, had 581 temblors of magnitude 3.0 or greater in 2014.  Its most severe one recently happened in November 2011, when a 5.6-magnitude quake wrecked more than a dozen houses and injured a couple of people.  Less severe but just as widespread quakes have been happening in North Texas, where the Barnett Shale has been exploited for natural gas in a big way, and injection wells are operating there too.

Because of the huge volumes of wastewater to deal with, oil and gas producers don't have too many options that won't make their operations too expensive to carry out.  Treating the water to extract the salt and other minerals would mean distilling it, a hugely costly process that would turn them all into water-purification plants with an unprofitable sideline of making oil and gas as a byproduct.  So that's not an option.  Trucking it to a place where injecting it wouldn't cause earthquakes would be expensive, even if we knew of a nearby place where injecting it wouldn't cause earthquakes.  And just throwing it out on the ground, which used to be a common practice in the bad old days before 1950 or so, would cause huge amounts of waterway pollution because of the salts, radioactivity, and other nasty stuff that comes up with the water.  So going to the expense of drilling wells typically much deeper than the producing ones and injecting the wastewater downhole at tremendous pressures is the only thing that producers can typically do with it.

The trouble is, rocks are porous—that's the only way you can inject water into them in the first place.  So that high-pressure water starts to move, and seeps toward faults, which are just big cracks between intact blocks of rock.  Some faults are under shear stress.  To envision shear stress, think of holding two old-fashioned chalkboard erasers together face to face and rubbing them back and forth across each other.  It's shear stress you put on them that makes them slide.  If you mash the erasers together perpendicularly, putting them under compressive stress, it's a lot harder to get them to move with shear stress.  So a fault that is under shear stress won't slip and cause an earthquake as long as the compressive stress is great enough.

Then along comes your water injection at high pressure.  It seeps through the pores to the cracks and provides an opposing pressure that can counteract the compressive stress that's keeping the fault from slipping.  We're not talking lubrication here, but large opposing mechanical forces.  I'm sure the technical details involve stress tensors and the whole nine yards of solid mechanics, but the basic picture is simple.  When the fluid pressure exceeds a certain threshold, that fault is going to let go, and you've got an earthquake.  People have even done experiments in the field to figure out exactly how much stress makes the faults slip, and there is a definite threshold, just as theory predicts.

Both from mechanical analyses and statistical studies, as well as abundant seismological data correlating particular regions of earthquake activity with particular injection-well activity, by now it is clear to all but the most biased observers that, generally speaking, the injection-well activity has caused the increase in earthquakes in both Texas and Oklahoma.  The U. S. Geological Survey, which has been issuing long-range earthquake predictions by region for some time now for the convenience of structural engineers, insurance companies, and other interested parties, has had to revise its forecasts for Oklahoma and Texas sharply upward in the last few years.  A contour map of earthquake likelihood for Oklahoma now looks like an archery target with Oklahoma City in the bullseye.  And the scientific literature abounds with studies showing details of the correlation.

Oklahoma has a long tradition of assertive state government, dating back to the 1930s when it passed laws regulating things like the price of ice.  And they have now continued that tradition by shutting down individual wells since 2015 and regulating the volume of wastewater that can be injected.  On the other hand, the Texas agency in charge of oil and gas regulation (for historical reasons, it's called the Texas Railroad Commission) still has not been able to bring itself to admit that any earthquakes have been triggered by water injection associated with fossil-fuel production.  But recently the Commission asserted its right to shut down wells if it wants to.  So far, though, it hasn't wanted to.

To some degree, all this is water under the bridge, or well, as the case may be.  Oil and gas markets are glutted right now, and the consensus is that the big fracking boom is over, at least in Texas and Oklahoma.  But all that injected water is still down there, slowly diffusing, and some geologists estimate that the effects of water injection on earthquakes can last as long as twenty years.  So in that sense, we may be dealing with the aftershocks of the fracking boom for some time.

Sources:  Anna Kuchment's article "Drilling for Earthquakes" appeared in the July 2016 print issue of Scientific American, pp. 46-53.  I also referred to a U. S. Department of Energy table of shale-gas production available at https://www.eia.gov/dnav/ng/ng_prod_shalegas_s1_a.htm.  I blogged on earthquakes and fracking most recently on Dec. 30, 2013.

Democracy By Sampling

If you had stopped by my house last Saturday, you would have seen me seated on the front porch in a folding chair, watching a presentation on a laptop connected to a notebook computer, which was in turn operated by a woman seated in another folding chair.  The woman works for a contractor to the U. S. Department of Commerce.  The contractor, Abt SRBI, performs high-tech surveys for government agencies.  Instead of pencils and clipboards, the woman brought along the aforementioned technology that she used to show me the options I had for each answer, as well as photographs and other information related to the survey questions.  My subject today is not so much the actual content of the survey (which she requested I keep confidential so as not to bias other potential participants), but the entire process of which the survey was a part, which I'm calling "democracy by sampling."

One vital aspect of engineering ethics is to consider all the stakeholders in a given case, including members of the public liable to be affected by a proposed course of action.  I think it's okay for me to say this much about the survey:  it dealt with a proposed program that the Department of Commerce may implement, and would entail substantial costs to be borne by the U. S. taxpayer.  The program would address an environmental issue which it turns out I have discussed in this space in the past, and it would deal with it in a way that struck me as egregiously boneheaded.  And I told them so.

But unless you, gentle reader, are one of the 1500 or so people nationwide selected to participate in this survey, if you wish to register your opinion on this subject with the government, you are out of luck.  This is unfair, but all too symptomatic of a disheartening trend that has picked up the momentum of an avalanche in recent years.

The ideal of democratic government is that it is, in the words of Abraham Lincoln, "of the people, by the people, for the people."  The preposition in question here is "by."  Ultimately, the authority of government is to vest in the people governed.  The means by which this power is exercised in our type of government is through the legislative branch, meaning Congress.  Originally, the only role of the executive branch was to see that the laws were "faithfully executed." 

But beginning in the Progressive era of the early 1900s, a different view of government arose, which can be summarized as government by experts.  The basic idea is that modern life is too complex to leave governance solely to the slow, messy process of legislating laws.  Instead, new powers should devolve upon educated specialists in such fields as finance, technology and its regulation, commerce, and human relations, and we should allow these experts to make such rules as they think best—rules that have the full force of law.  So far, any agency of this type still holds before its face a mask of democracy, in that the agencies exercising such power have to be established by Congress.  But there are so many of them now that Congress can no longer exercise anything like proper oversight anymore.  The result is that executive agencies like the Department of Commerce and its divisions are left to their own devices and desires.

I will grant this to the Department:  in commissioning the survey I participated in, they are genuinely seeking the input of the public, or at least a sample thereof.  They didn't have to do that—as far as I know, they could just haul off and implement the new program they're considering without asking anybody, and we would all just have to live with it.  So they are at least making a gesture toward the idea of democracy.  But it is an ineffectual gesture, in my opinion.

As a part of the survey, I had an opportunity to "vote" for or against the program, and to give reasons for doing so.  But this "vote" is to real voting as hypocrisy is to holiness.  What if we "voted" to elect the President this way?  It would save tons of money and trouble.  Instead of the Electoral College and all that campaign fundraising and advertising and so on, we'd just hand the whole thing over to Abt SRBI, whose experts would come up with a carefully selected sample of 1500 or so voters, and the rest of us would just wait to find out the results, as determined by the experts.  So much more efficient—so much more scientific.

And so much more opposed to the basic notion of rule by law, and not by men.  One of the big reasons that the thirteen British colonies broke away from England was that they were being taxed by those whom they did not elect.  Based on the information I received during the survey, the proposed program would have done exactly that—nothing was mentioned about any enabling legislation.  This sort of thing happens all the time.  The Environmental Protection Agency's decision to categorize carbon dioxide as a pollutant is a shining example of how unelected bureaucrats can unilaterally proclaim costly regulations, and those injured are forced to undertake expensive legal battles as their only recourse. 

The Department of Commerce deserves one small cheer for consulting me about their idea.  But the whole executive branch gets a loud razz for continuing its drive toward government by bureaucracy that has compromised freedom and due process in this country so severely, that some days I wonder if we can ever get them back again.