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.

 

Federal Regulators Turn the Heat Up on Tesla

 

On Tuesday, Oct. 12, the U. S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) sent a letter to the automaker Tesla telling it to issue a recall notice if a software upgrade to its vehicles involves a safety issue.  This is the latest development in an escalating conflict between federal regulators and the electric-car maker, whose flamboyant CEO, Elon Musk, seems to enjoy twitting regulators of all kinds.  But beyond personalities, what we are seeing here is a conflict between a traditional legal system and a technology that has advanced beyond it.

 

The immediate issue that prompted the letter was an "over-the-air" software upgrade that Tesla made in late September.  The NHTSA had started investigating a number of crashes of Tesla vehicles into emergency vehicles that were parked and had their flashers operating.  The upgrade was intended to improve the ability of Tesla vehicles to avoid hitting emergency vehicles in low-light conditions. 

 

What annoyed the NHTSA was not that Tesla addressed the problem they were looking into, but the fact that they didn't issue a recall notice along with all the formalities and paperwork that are required along with it.

 

On the one hand, Tesla's position makes a certain amount of sense.  Back in the pre-software days when every automotive defect required a trip to the repair shop, the only way to get something fixed was to issue a recall to every traceable owner of every involved vehicle and try to get them all repaired within a reasonable time frame.  But now that software comprises a growing part of the overall system that we still call an automobile, upgrades can be done remotely and silently over the Internet without the owner even being aware of it.  So why go through all the hassle and bother of a recall when the thing can be done without anybody but the automaker knowing about it?

 

On the other hand, the NHTSA seems to think that such so-called "stealth recalls" can lead to problems.  How do car owners know the upgrade has really been done?  How will purchasers of used cars know they're getting a car with all pertinent upgrades?  What if an accident happens before the upgrade is done and there's no public record of whether the particular car involved was upgraded before the accident?  It's issues like these that are presumably behind the NHTSA's insistence that even over-the-air upgrades have to be accompanied by recall notices if they affect safety issues.

 

Of course, which upgrades affect safety is not always an easy matter to determine.  But the upgrade issued to improve the discrimination of emergency-vehicle lights certainly falls in that category.  This is not a trivial matter for Tesla, because if the NHTSA decides the firm has not complied with recall regulations by Nov. 1, they can fine the company $114 million.  Even to Elon Musk, one of the richest men in the world, that is not chump change.  And there are the people called shareholders to consider.

 

Concerns like these are not confined to the NHTSA's dealings with Tesla, as cars from all makers are starting to resemble rolling software platforms rather than the all-mechanical vehicles of old.  The AP report describing the conflict attributes the agency's tougher stance to a general trend on the part of the Biden administration to clamp down on automated-vehicle safety issues, rather than tread lightly for fear of crippling the new technology in its cradle, so to speak. 

 

A dyed-in-the-wool libertarian might criticize the NHTSA for insisting on its bureaucratic rules being followed despite the fact that Tesla was doing the right thing, namely, fixing the emergency-vehicle-light problem that was attracting public attention.  But decades of experience with government regulation of auto safety includes numerous examples, ranging from introducing double-layer safety glass to defective-air-bag recalls, in which it is pretty clear that left to their own devices, the automakers would not have acted to protect the public from the hazards caused by their own products. 

 

The problem I see is not whether to regulate, but how to regulate in light of "over-the-air" recalls that do not require physical trips to a repair shop that are hard to document.  Clearly, the old-fashioned recall regulations need revisiting in the light of current technology, and it's always easier for a bureaucracy to use the regulations it has rather than to rethink them on the fly. 

 

But suppose there had been some kind of National Internet Security Administration in place at the dawn of the Internet, and in the 1990s they'd passed a regulation requiring all web-browser designing firms to write letters (not emails, but letters) to all users whenever an upgrade to their web browser was made that affected security.  That might have made a little sense back when web browsers were upgraded once a year, but anyone using Microsoft products knows upgrades are done almost daily, affecting all kinds of things, including security.  If such a regulation were still in place about notifying users, we'd all be buried in a blizzard of mail from software companies.  This would be a boon for the U. S. Postal Service, but not for anyone else.

 

So clearly, new technologies call for new regulatory processes.  One can imagine some kind of software certification for purchasers of used cars, verifying that the cars they buy have all the software upgrades made up to the date of purchase.  That would require cooperation among the automakers, used-car dealers, state and federal regulators, and customers, but these parties have worked together in the past, and it can happen again.  As for written notifications any time safety-related software is upgraded, it sounds to me a little like the NHTSA is hounding Tesla just for hounding's sake. 

 

In a related concern, there are genuine issues regarding how easy it is for drivers to fool Tesla's autopilot into thinking the driver is paying attention to the roadway when in fact the driver is playing a video game or even sitting in the back seat.  And Tesla needs to be taken to task for that issue.  But it's not good sense to punish a company for doing the right thing, which the NHTSA appears to have done in this case.

 

Sources:  Many news outlets published the Oct. 13 AP story by Tom Krisher which was entitled on the AP website "US regulators seek answers from Tesla over lack of recall," at https://apnews.com/article/technology-business-software-881ef270cbfdc6e4f62b88400588686f, to which I referred.

Federal Safety Agency Investigates Tesla Autopilot

 

In 2015, the upstart automaker Tesla introduced its Autopilot feature, an advanced artificial-intelligence-enabled system that takes over most of the routine operations that a human driver normally performs.  At the same time, Tesla warned Autopilot users that they should remain attentive with their hands on the wheel at all times, even when Autopilot is engaged.

 

This is a little bit like taking a hungry child into a candy store and telling them not to touch anything.  Most kids will obey, but it's hard on the kid and it can lead to embarrassing situations.

 

It's not surprising that, according to the U. S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), since 2016 ten people have died in eight crashes of Tesla vehicles in which the Autopilot feature was the cause of the crash.  Lately, there have been numerous crashes, one of them fatal, in which Teslas with Autopilot engaged have run into the rear of emergency vehicles with flashing lights. 

 

Finally, the NHTSA has had enough.  It has launched a formal investigation into how the Autopilot system works, how it is implemented, what its defects are, and what steps Tesla has taken to make sure that drivers are paying attention like they are supposed to when the Autopilot is driving the car.  There is abundant evidence that in many of the crashes, the driver was doing something other than watching the road:  watching a movie, playing a video game, or even sitting in a seat other than the driver's seat.  The Autopilot system is supposed to monitor hand pressure on the steering wheel, but according to some sources, this feature is very easy to defeat, and many people appear to have done so.  And most of them probably get away with it most of the time.  But not always.

 

In human-machine safety issues, there is a tradeoff between the two poles which represent extreme approaches to operating a device safely.  One pole relies totally on training the individual not to do dangerous things, or to do them in a safe way, if that makes sense.  Think of stunt drivers in the movie business:  they do things with cars that cars are not designed to do, but with careful planning and finely-honed skills, they manage to survive car flips, crashes, and other tricks that have probably passed into history now that CGI technology is so good that real stunt drivers are probably looking for work.  But the point is that this approach to safety concentrates on the knowledge and attention of the operator or driver, and basically tells him or her to drive safely.

 

The other pole of safety is building in foolproof safety features to the machine itself, so that even an ignorant five-year-old turned loose with the keys couldn't get hurt.  It's not possible to make a car at a reasonable price that is completely safe no matter what you do—at least not yet.  But many of the autonomous-vehicle-type features that are now showing up on many makes besides Tesla move in this direction:  lane-keeping features, automatic braking to avoid head-on collisions, and so on.  They make up for a driver's deficiencies, inattention, or errors.  But they are far from perfect yet, and so the attention and intelligence of the driver are still needed to fill in the gaps where systems like Tesla's Autopilot still can't figure out the situation, such as an emergency vehicle stopped in your lane.

 

I expect the NHTSA will encounter some headwinds in trying to figure out Tesla's Autopilot system.  Elon Musk has, shall we say, a rather cavalier attitude toward convention and traditional ways of doing things, and recently abolished Tesla's public-relations department.  Perhaps he thinks a few tweets from him do just as well, and in the absence of more formal ways of getting information from the company, he may be right.  But nobody can stop the NHTSA from renting or buying some Teslas and putting them through various scenarios and seeing what they do with and without human supervision.  Whatever is going on under the hood, the results will be clear to see.

 

But just testing the hardware and software is only part of the issue.  The poisonous mixture that the NHTSA is dealing with combines an Autopilot system that is very good—so good that people really can let it drive the car for many minutes at a time and get away with it—and drivers who either intentionally put too much trust in the Autopilot system, or simply get distracted and fail to do what they know they ought to be doing, which is looking at the road.  But nobody just accidentally starts watching a movie or playing a video game, and so we must conclude that in at least some of the cases where inattention and the Autopilot have caused crashes, people simply ignored the advice of Tesla to not let Autopilot drive the car by itself, and paid the penalty for their inattention.

 

Now in some countries and cultures (and political persuasions—notably extreme libertarianism), this would not be a concern of the government's.  If people want to do foolish things and ignore instructions, well, let them do it and suffer the consequences.  The problem with this attitude is that it ignores everybody else, particularly other people who might be harmed and killed in the same accident.

 

My point is simply that we in the U. S. have grown accustomed to holding automakers to safety standards that avoid preventable accidents, in the sense that preventable accidents follow a consistent pattern which reasonable interventions at not too much cost can prevent. 

 

We are in a curious transition phase in which systems like Autopilot are good enough to fool us that they can really drive our cars without us paying any attention, but not good enough to do it for real.  And until it is just as safe to play pinochle from the driver's seat as it is at home, we need some way to remind drivers that they can't ignore the road even if the car seems to be driving itself.

 

Sources:  I consulted an article in Consumer Reports at https://www.consumerreports.org/autonomous-driving/nhtsa-safety-defect-investigation-tesla-autopilot-crashes-a6996819019/ and an article in the Aug. 16 Austin American-Statesman online edition "Feds Open Investigation Into Tesla's Autopilot System.  The statistic on total fatalities and accidents due to Autopilot since 2016 was obtained from https://thehill.com/changing-america/sustainability/infrastructure/561717-increasing-number-of-crashes-involving-teslas#:~:text=In%20total%2C%20at%20least%2010,each%20year%20in%20the%20U.S.

The Pemex Vinyl Chloride Plant Explosion

Unless you work in the petrochemical industry, you have probably never been near the substance called vinyl chloride.  It is a chlorinated hydrocarbon that is made when one of the four hydrogen atoms in the compound called ethylene is replaced by a chlorine atom.  On the other hand, unless you live in a house whose plumbing is all more than forty or so years old, you probably use products made with vinyl chloride every day.  Polyvinylchloride (PVC) pipes are used in the plumbing of nearly all new residential and business construction, and about 40 million metric tons (units of 1,000 kg) of PVC plastic were made in 2013.  But all PVC pipes were once the toxic, flammable liquid called vinyl chloride, and that is what may have got loose at the Pemex chlorinate 3 plant in the Gulf Coast city of Coatzacoalcos, Mexico last Wednesday, Apr. 20.  The resulting explosion and fire killed at least 28 people and injured over a hundred, with more still missing as of today.

Besides the immediate human tragedy, this accident raises important questions about the safety record of the state-owned petroleum company Pemex.

At this writing, little is known about the cause of the blast.  Coatzacoalcos is a town at the very southernmost tip of the Gulf of Mexico, in the Mexican state of Veracruz between central Mexico and the Yucatan Peninsula.  It is one of the main export terminals for Mexican oil and is a logical location for a vinyl-chloride plant, since its manufacture requires large quantities of the petrochemical ethylene.  The chlorinate 3 plant is a joint venture between Pemex and a PVC-pipe manufacturer called Mexichem. 

As with many petrochemicals, vinyl chloride is hazardous in several ways.  If released into the air, it evaporates into a dense vapor and can catch fire if a source of ignition such as an automobile engine is nearby.  Worse yet, the products of combustion are themselves hazardous:  hydrogen chloride (which when dissolved in water makes hydrochloric acid), and phosgene, which was used as a poison gas in World War I.  Besides the danger of explosion and fire, vinyl chloride is extremely toxic, and causes liver damage in animals at concentrations in air as low as 500 parts per million.  Higher concentrations cause acute illness and even death.  Because of these hazards, vinyl chloride is usually stored in double-walled containers under pressure, with leak monitors that detect low levels of leakage from the inner container before the outer wall is breached. 

It may take months before we can learn exactly what happened at Coatzacoalcos, but it is obvious that a large amount of something flammable got loose.  Some reports mention a strong odor of ammonia, which could be from refrigeration machinery used in process cooling operations in the plant.  Whether or not vinyl chloride itself was released, the high death toll says several things about this accident.

First, one can ask why there were so many people in a hazardous area.  The trend in modern petrochemical operations is to reduce staffing to the point that in emergencies or during strikes, an entire plant can be operated safely from one central control room.  Although this is speculation, it is possible that Pemex, being owned by the Mexican government, has adopted a different policy and relies more on hands-on operators in its plants as a way of increasing government-paid employment.  Whatever the reason, Pemex's safety record is not good.  News reports of this accident relate that in 2012, 26 people were killed in a natural-gas facility owned by Pemex and in 2013, an explosion in Pemex's Mexico City facilities killed 37 people. 

Next, what kind of safety culture does Pemex have?  To run a complex petrochemical plant without accidents is a monumental task, and many safety priorities are expensive, in the sense that they take resources which otherwise could be used to enlarge the firm's bottom line.  With the recent crash in oil prices, there are reports that Pemex is cutting expenses, and this latest accident raises the question of whether safety has been sacrificed to budget considerations.

Finally, there is Pemex's status as a state-owned enterprise.  I am not familiar with Mexican law, but it is quite possible that it is either statutorily or practically difficult to sue Pemex.  Also, Pemex may be self-insured rather than purchasing hazard insurance on the open market.  Both of these factors, if true, remove two of the greatest incentives private firms have to run their operations safely:  fear of lawsuits from injured parties and financial pressure from private insurers to run a safe and low-claims operation.  Without such incentives, Pemex management has only its own integrity to rely on for worker safety, and the demands for sustaining profits in the face of falling oil prices may have overwhelmed safety concerns. 

I hope that the investigative bodies in Mexico have all the competence and authority they need, not only to get to the bottom of this tragedy, but to publicize its causes and assign responsibility wherever it needs to be assigned.  Again, the status of Pemex as a state-owned firm may lead to conflicts of interest between state officials who want to make workplaces safer, and other officials who do not want to see a state-owned enterprise called to account.  The loser in such a conflict will be the workers who have the choice of being paid to put their lives on the line in a hazardous workplace, or to go somewhere else and earn even less than the $12,000 US annual salary that was the average in 2005 for Mexican chemical engineers. 

If reports surface in English as to the cause of this accident, it will be interesting to learn whether poor safety practices contributed to it.  In the meantime, my sympathy goes to all of those who lost loved ones or were injured.  And I hope this latest incident leads to a re-evaluation of the entire safety culture of Pemex, which looks like it could use a lot of work.

Sources:  I referred to a Reuters report on the accident at http://www.reuters.com/article/us-mexico-pemex-idUSKCN0XH2N2, an ABC News report at http://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/death-toll-28-mexico-petrochemical-plant-explosion-38614458, a Fox News item at http://www.foxnews.com/world/2016/04/21/blast-at-mexico-petrochemical-plant-kills-3-injures-more-than-100.html, and a CNN report at http://www.cnn.com/2016/04/23/americas/mexico-pemex-petrochemical-blast/.  I also referred to statistics on PVC production at http://www.plasticstoday.com/study-global-pvc-demand-grow-32-annually-through-2021/196257501821043, a salary survey for Mexico at http://www.worldsalaries.org/mexico.shtml, and the Wikipedia articles on vinyl chloride and ethylene. 

A Tech Fix for Texting While Driving

By now, almost everybody with a cellphone and a car knows that it's a bad idea to text while you're driving.  But people still do it, and some of those people die in text-related car crashes and take innocent victims with them.  What if technology existed that simply prevented people from texting from a moving car at all?  Wouldn't that solve the problem?

Scott Tibbetts thought so.  Tibbets and his company Katasi were profiled in a recent New York Times article for developing a promising technology that would simply block texting from any phone that was in a moving car.  While there are several technological solutions to this problem that are already on the market, they all have various problems. 

Some text-blocking apps work by using the phone's GPS to figure out if the phone is moving faster than walking speed.  If it is, the software concludes that you're driving, and blocks texts.  This one turns out to be a battery hog, because the GPS system has to run all the time.  It also might present problems for train and bus passengers.  Another system uses the car's speed sensor and links it to the phone with a Bluetooth wireless connection.  But it costs over a hundred bucks, and there aren't that many people who are both concerned enough about texting while driving to buy it, and also willing to shell out that much money for something they could do for free with a little more willpower, perhaps. 

Mr. Tibbetts' solution is cleverer than these.  It involves connecting a wireless box to the car's OBD-II port—the on-board diagnostics socket that the auto technicians use to figure out what the "service engine" light means.  When the car's moving fast enough to be dangerous, the wireless box sends that information to the cellphone network, which then asks the phone—once—where it is.  Then, if the network is using the software developed by Mr. Tibbetts' firm Katasi, the software uses the location data to figure out things like who is driving the car.  You don't want a whole family's text service blocked just because Mom is driving to the grocery store, for instance.  That way, the GPS battery-drain problem is minimized, and the computational heavy lifting is done in the cloud, so to speak, rather than by the phone.

Mr. Tibbetts, an aerospace engineer and entrepreneur, has persuaded both an insurance company and a cellphone provider (Sprint) to cooperate in test trials, which have worked fine.  But it appears that the largest player, Sprint, has gotten cold feet lately, and has stalled further tests.  In the Times interview, Wayne Ward, vice-president for business and product development at Sprint, expressed concerns about product liability.  Currently, if a driver texts while driving and gets in a wreck, it's the driver's fault.  Mr. Ward asks what might happen if Sprint sells the Katasi system that claims to prevent such accidents, and then some glitch happens and somebody sneaks through a text and crashes anyway?  Why, Sprint could be sued!

Pardon me, but it appears that there's more going on here than meets the eye.  Any time a small independent company comes up to a big firm and offers the big guy new technology, the not-invented-here problem can raise its ugly head.  Short of buying the small upstart outright (which happens a lot, by the way), if the big firm adapts the small company's technology, they will be on the hook for royalty payments or other forms of obligation that big companies don't want to be tied down to.  And there's also the simple pride factor expressed by the phrase "not invented here"—if we didn't think of it first, it can't be that good. 

Besides, it's not clear who would make enough money to offset the expenses of the added hardware and software—and lawyers' fees, if Mr. Ward's fears turned out to be correct.  The existing GPS-based solutions for text blocking in cars aren't exactly selling like hotcakes, even after all but five states have adopted no-texting-while-driving laws of one form or another. 

One could imagine a legal solution:  make something like the Katasi text-blocking system mandatory by government fiat.  Nobody has seriously put forward that idea yet.  But it might happen.  There was a time when ordinary window glass was used in automobiles, with the result that otherwise minor wrecks turned deadly when razor-sharp knives of glass flew around and sliced—well, enough said.  But when the technology of laminating glass with a plastic inner layer was developed around 1920 to keep the shattered pieces together, auto companies adopted it, partly motivated by fear of lawsuits.  Eventually, most countries made it a legal requirement for all glass in automobiles to be laminated or safety glass, but it looks like the firms were ahead of the government in that case.

Safety glass is a different kind of thing than automatic text-blocking.  An auto company could start using safety glass and just raise the car's price incrementally, and hardly any customers would notice the change.  But as soon as you stop a person from doing something that they're used to doing, like texting while driving, you create a sharp negative impression.  And that's something that cellphone providers are reluctant to do as long as there are competitors ready to take business away.

My hat is off to Mr. Tibbetts, who put five years and millions of dollars into developing a clever technological fix for a significant problem.  But as many engineers turned entrepreneurs have learned, building the better mousetrap­—or text trap—is only part of the problem.  Convincing people to buy it and use it is often harder than coming up with the invention itself.  If everybody used something like the Katasi system on their cellphones, we would all be safer, no question about that.  We would also lose a little freedom of judgment which we can now exercise, which is whether to text while driving.  Perhaps some telecomm industry leaders will get together and agree to adopt Katasi, or something like it, but such inter-company cooperation for a non-financial thing like safety is a rarity.  It could happen, though.  I bet Mr. Tibbetts, for one, hopes that it will. 

Sources:  The New York Times article "Trying to Hit the Brake on Texting While Driving" by Matt Richtel, appeared in the online edition on Sept. 13, 2014 at http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/14/business/trying-to-hit-the-brake-on-texting-while-driving.html.  I also referred to Wikipedia articles on on-board diagnostics, windshields, and safety glass. 

Do You Smell Gas? Thank New London

On Thursday, March 18, 1937, a seventh-grade girl named Sibyl sat in a school bus outside the junior-senior high school building built four years earlier in the unincorporated town of New London, Texas.  In contrast to the rest of the nation, New London and the surrounding area of East Texas were prospering from a local oil boom, and many of the school's students came from families drawn to the area by oil-field jobs.  Sibyl had mistakenly left her class early, but rather than go back inside and look foolish, she had decided just to wait in the bus until school let out for the day in another twenty minutes or so.  Suddenly, at 3:17 PM, she saw the entire front of the building rise several feet into the air and then collapse into a huge pile of dust with a thunderous crash.  She had just narrowly escaped what turned out to be the worst school disaster in the history of the United States.  Over three hundred children and adults died either in the explosion itself or as a result of injuries they sustained in it.  The cause?  Odorless natural gas.

As you may know, natural gas has no characteristic odor of its own.  By law, a malodorant must be added to natural gas for non-industrial users such as homes, businesses, and schools so that a leak will call attention to itself by means of smell.  One of the compounds used, butyl mercaptan, is so stinky that the average human nose detects it at a level of 0.33 parts per billion.  That concentration amounts to one teaspoon of malodorant in a cube of air about 25 meters (80 feet) on a side.  While gas leaks and explosions still occur, the chances of detecting a leak before it causes an explosion are much better when the gas contains a malodorant. 

Flammable gas has been used for domestic light and heat since the early 1800s, but until the discovery of large supplies of natural gas, piped-in gas was a relatively costly type of utility that was confined to cities.  By contrast, the oil wells around New London freely produced so much natural gas that it was (and still often is) considered a waste product, and was flared off near wells in towering flames that burned day and night and could be seen for miles.  The oil companies piped some of it around in what were called bleed-off lines to supply power for their own operations, and because many of New London's residents were already familiar with oilfield equipment and piping, tapping a nearby gas line for free raw natural gas became a common practice.  Although it was technically illegal, someone with the requisite skills could install his own private gas line to an oil lease's bleed-off line, and enjoy free gas instead of paying the local gas utility for it. 

It is a matter of record that a couple of months before the 1937 explosion, W. C. Shaw, superintendent of the New London schools, authorized a janitor to disconnect the schoolhouse from the local gas utility and tap a nearby bleed-off line instead.  Mr. Shaw apparently viewed this as a cost-saving measure, similar to the earlier decision when the school was built to forego the usual steam-boiler-radiator heating system, and instead install an extensive gas piping system and some seventy gas space heaters instead. 

In My Boys and Girls Are in There, a recent book on the tragedy, historian Ron Rozelle notes that many subsequent summaries of the disaster tend to blame Superintendent Shaw for endangering the lives of his charges with the decision to use free untreated bleed-off gas.  The critical question, which Mr. Rozelle doesn't answer in the book, is whether the local gas company was adding malodorant to its product at the time.  Such a practice was widespread by 1937, but by no means universal.  If the utility's gas was odorless as well, then the decision to switch to bleed-off gas made no difference, because the leak that caused the explosion would not have been any easier to detect.  The main reason that the explosion was so severe and extensive was that the poured-concrete school building had a single, poorly ventilated, and uninterrupted crawl space beneath the entire front part of the building, under eight inches of solid concrete floor.  Since natural gas (primarily methane) is lighter than air, this crawl space formed a good container for thousands of cubic feet of gas, which was touched off on that fatal day when a shop teacher switched on an electric sander in the basement. 

While the New London explosion dominated national news for a week or so, it faded quickly as other events diverted the public's attention.  Like war veterans often do, survivors of the explosion usually refused to talk about it afterwards.  However, one survivor, fifth-grader Carolyn Jones, had the courage to make a speech to the Texas House and Senate in Austin only a week after the explosion, urging that safety measures be passed to prevent another disaster like the one at New London.  The result?  Two laws:  one requiring all natural gas for domestic purposes to contain a malodorant, and the other requiring that anyone working on residential natural-gas lines for residential use must be trained and certified for such work by the state of Texas.  The publicity of the New London disaster furnished ammunition for the passage of similar laws in other states, so that eventually, all natural gas sold for household use would carry its own portable detection system, namely, a bad smell.

The New London explosion and its aftermath form a familiar pattern:  first an innovation (the use of natural gas for domestic gas supplies was fairly new in the 1930s); then a tragedy resulting from inadequate safeguards, ignorance, or other factors; then regulations, or a change in good engineering practices, or both, all inspired by the tragedy.  It would be nice if engineers were able to anticipate everything that could go wrong in a novel situation.  But human ingenuity being both fallible and limited, sometimes we have to learn from mistakes, and the more costly the mistake in terms of lives, the faster we learn.  While nothing will ever bring back those three hundred lives lost on that East Texas afternoon seventy-six years ago, it is some comfort to know that their lives were not lost in vain, and that gas users around the globe are safer as a result. 

Sources:  I thank Andrea Nelson and Stephen Paul for bringing my attention to Ron Rozelle's book My Boys and Girls Are in There (College Station:  Texas A&M University Press, 2012), which I relied on for most of the material in today's column.  I also referred to the Wikipedia articles on the history of manufactured gas, thiols, and tert-butylthiol.