End of the Line for the Shuttle

As of this evening (Sunday May 1), the last flight of the Space Shuttle Endeavor has been postponed till at least May 8, a week from today. To fly, Endeavor needs hydraulic power. To make hydraulic power in space, Endeavor has three auxiliary power units (APUs) on the craft that run on hydrazine, a nasty compound that can freeze if it gets too cold, as it is apt to in space. So each APU has a heater to keep the hydrazine warm. Something went wrong with one of the power circuits to a heater, and they’re going to have to replace a switchbox. So neither President Obama nor the estimated three-quarter-million people who gathered in Florida to watch the launch had the satisfaction of seeing Endeavor take off for the last time. This turn of events was regrettable, perhaps, but in these last flights NASA seems to be erring on the side of caution, which is just as well.

In past blog posts, I have made it clear that I think the Space Shuttle program ran about a decade too long. After the 2003 Columbia disaster, it was time to rethink the nation’s entire approach to space and space exploration. Instead, patches were applied to patches, and the program has limped along for eight more years, fortunately without further loss of life, unless you count James Vanover, a 53-year-old contract engineer who fell to his death at the launch pad last March 14. I’m sure Mrs. Vanover counts him, even if others don’t.

Even the simplest orbit-capable rocket is a horrendously complex engineered system. And making one that is both safe enough and powerful enough to carry people­–and all their necessary comforts of home such as food, air, water, and room enough to move around in–is vastly harder than simply putting some non-breathing, non-eating, and expendable hardware up there. So for decades, the vast majority of scientists who really want to do science in space have favored cutting back or eliminating manned space flight in preference to putting much more efficient dollars into unmanned launches of robot probes such as the highly successful Mars rover.

Of course, science and engineering are hopelessly confused in the public mind. Just this morning at church, one of the worship team leaders said something about “this doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure this out.” “Rocket scientist” is one of those phrases that has taken on a life of its own, although you could argue that the last true rocket scientist was Newton, in the sense that he wrote down the fundamental equations that turned rocketry from a mysterious art into an engineering chore. Ever since then, we’ve had lots of rocket engineers, but strictly speaking, no rocket scientists.

It’s fruitless to point out these pedantic trivialities to millions who will go on saying “rocket scientist” and thinking the United States will take another big step toward the Hall of Shame if we can no longer put a man into space. But manned space flight has always been about something more than science, or even engineering, though it has taken billions of dollars’ worth of both to achieve it and keep it going. In the 1960s the space race was a sublimated way to fight the Cold War. In the 1980s, the Shuttle program turned into a political football that provided convenient ways for congressmen to send federal dollars to their states and districts. Any science that gets done with it is sort of a byproduct, a kind of window-dressing to make it more presentable to the public. This is not to criticize the scientists who manage to get good science done even with all the constraints posed by the Shuttle. But if we had the last thirty years to do all over again, with the same funding but no people in space, we probably could have built five or six Hubble telescopes or their more advanced equivalents for the same money it cost to keep the Shuttle cripping along all this time.

From an engineering point of view, the politics has clouded the situation again. Constellation, the leading candidate to replace the Shuttle, is now basically canceled, and there is no clear consensus on what we ought to do next. One option favored by President Obama (and this is one of the few proposals he has made which seems sensible to me) is to turn NASA into a contract-supervision outfit, and let private enterprise conduct the work of space exploration, including making money at it if that can be done. Clearly, the U. S. government will be the main, if not the only, customer for the near future, even if most of NASA’s work is privatized. And that brings us back to the main question: what good is manned space flight?

It’s not science. And it’s engineering, strictly speaking, only if it makes money. So what if we as a nation explore space for the same reason mountaineers climb mountains: because it’s there? That is an esthetic, or if you prefer, even a religious reason. And there are large numbers of people involved with space and related matters (such as the search for extraterrestrial intelligence) whose secret or not-so-secret hope is that we will either find somebody else out there, or we’ll eventually move out there ourselves in a big way, not a few at a time in a glorified flying tuna can.

Thinking that it is man’s destiny either to live on other planets, or to find beings who live on other planets, is so far an act of faith. While this is a free country and everyone has a right to their own beliefs, we also have what is called disestablishment of religion. That means one religious group can’t get the government to tax everybody to pay for their own worship services. To the extent that manned spaceflight is an act of worship in the religion of space destiny, I for one would like to see my tax dollars go somewhere else.

Sources: The latest Space Shuttle launch schedules, news releases, and other helpful information can be found at the NASA website www.nasa.gov.

Pornography and the Decline of the Nerd

You can’t have engineering ethics without engineers, so every once in a while I look into the question of where our future engineers are coming from. There’s no law that assures us that in every batch of 18-year-olds, there will always be a sufficient number both interested in and qualified for the engineering work of tomorrow. Some cultures seem inhospitable to the growth of engineers, while others sprout them like weeds on my lawn. My latest look into this topic is inspired by an article with the intriguing title, “Pornography & the End of Eros.”

The author, a teacher, farmer, and freelance writer named Joe Bissonnette, looks at several studies in the U. S. and Japan which claim to find a correlation between a sharp decline in the incidence of reported rapes and the explosion of low-cost, widely available pornography, mainly on the Internet. Of course, simple correlation does not prove causation: both effects may be independent, or caused by something else entirely. But Bissonnette thinks the connection is real, and due to a “demystification factor” discussed as long ago as Socrates.

The basic idea is this: the nuclear conventional family requires a man who views his wife as a mystery to be explored, a kingdom to be conquered, and a treasure to be cherished. In contrast to these romantic notions, both pornography and Socrates (who recommended that men and women do gymnastics in the nude together, for political reasons) favor the reduction of eros to a commonplace commodity: instantly available on demand, routinized, and wholly under the control of the user. Consequently (and here is where engineering comes into the picture), Bissonnette says that “Edgy, libidinous, repressed, and sublimating young men are an endangered species. . . . Young men experience vicarious heroism through video games like Mortal Kombat, and relieve themselves of any arising sexual tensions through Internet porn, virtual sex, or relationship-free escort services.” One could add “relationship-free hookups” to that list, especially if the college environment on many campuses is taken into consideration. In other words, the classic shy, repressed, awkward-around-women nerd of yore is an endangered species.

The following is not meant to imply that women who truly desire to become engineers should encounter any artificial obstacles on their career path. But the fact remains that, despite millions of dollars spent by the National Science Foundation for raising the consciousness of women that engineering is a legitimate profession to consider, only about 15% to 20% of practicing engineers are female, and much less than that in certain fields like mechanical engineering and computer science. So if we woke up tomorrow and found that men around the world had permanently lost all interest in engineering, we’d have real problems in filling the gap with women. Therefore, discussing the problem of why more men don’t go into engineering is a reasonable thing to do.

The punchline is this: I think Bissonnette is onto something. His idea would be extremely hard to prove to the satisfaction of statistically-minded sociologists, and it might just melt away in the hard glare of survey-type investigations. But it makes intuitive sense to me.

Engineering is a demanding occupation which requires long-range planning, organization, a certain degree of pessimism allowing for the imagining of worst-case scenarios, and in short, a personality type that is capable of repressing the satisfaction of immediate desires in the cause of achieving longer-term goals. One could almost argue that the essence of engineering is planning, not the kind of spontaneous self-gratification that pornography allows.

Whatever the cause, it is a petrified fact that fewer undergraduates are choosing engineering as a major. The total undergraduate enrollment in U. S. engineering programs was essentially flat from 1985 to 2005, about 450,000. But in those two decades the U. S. population grew by 25%. So compared to the population, engineering enrollment has declined by a fourth. This is not a good trend.

It may be that online pornography is not a major factor in this decline, or is instead yet another symptom of a deeper cultural malaise. Despite all the equal-opportunity rhetoric expended on the topic, it is true that engineers tend to have certain personality features in common. While it would be absolutely wrong to pre-screen people for engineering school based on a survey of personality types, for example, it would be a legitimate social-science question to ask what in a culture favors the production of certain personality types and not others, namely the personality types that are attracted to, and competent in, engineering. If anyone ever braved the political winds to investigate this question in a dispassionate way, I think the results would show that engineers are disproportionately the product of strong, intact families with positive role models played by, pardon the expression, fathers. In today’s divorce-ridden politicized culture, such a finding would be heresy, and so I am not holding my breath in the expectation of seeing it published any time soon. But the type of family environment that produces “repressed, sublimated” men who treat women with true respect, admiration, and a sense of the mysterious, is also more likely to produce men who are good at engineering and want to do it.

In terms of what to do, I think the hope lies more in the spiritual realm than in anything any government can do, short of getting out of the way. And there is always hope for that.

Sources: Joe Bissonnette’s article, “Pornography & The End of Eros” appeared in vol. 36, no. 4, Fall 2010, pp. 74-79 of the Human Life Review. The statistics on undergraduate engineering enrollment in 1985 and 2005 are from the U. S. National Science Foundation website http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/seind08/c2/c2s2.htm#c2s22.

Big Brother, Sales Dept.

First, my apologies to all of my readers who are left, for not blogging last week. My wife went out of town and that disrupted all sorts of schedules, including the habit of updating my blog on Monday. She comes back this week and I hope that will help me get back to the usual routines.

The other day I had an experience which was not exactly creepy, but was well outside my usual range of experiences. Here’s how it went. For some years I have had a hankering for a bench grinder or motorized grinding wheel—one of those little jobbers with two abrasive wheels on the ends of a motor shaft where you can grind steel and other metals. The occasions I need such a thing are not many, but when you need a grinding wheel there are not a lot of other alternatives.

So I got online and looked around for grinding wheels, comparing prices, looking at features, etc. I do not spend a lot of time on this type of activity, and when I figured out that there are probably only one or two places in the world that make cheap bench grinders any more (both in China) and they sell the same basic thing to lots of retailers who put their own name and price on it, I stopped looking. The way our garage is jammed up with junk, there’s nowhere I could install a bench grinder right now anyway. So that was that—or so I thought.

A few days later, I was reading the website of a national political magazine that I also subscribe to. It has nothing to do with bench grinders. It’s a pretty lively website with nearly daily updates, and like most commercial websites it has advertising columns where all kinds of goods and services are for sale, many of which involve animations of women’s puffy bellies subsiding to svelte proportions. Needless to say, I just tune out these things when I’m interested in reading the website’s editorial content.

But this time, I noticed that right there next to what I was reading was not some sketch of a gal going from a size 30 to a size 4, but guess what?—Bench grinders! The very same ones I’d been checking out, in fact. This immediately gave rise in my soul to mixed emotions.

On the one hand, I’d rather have bench grinders on the periphery of my vision than distracting animations of bloated female flesh, or any of the other weird stuff advertisers have hatched to capture your attention for that fraction of a second which, multiplied by sixteen billion, means hard cash for the advertiser. So it was an improvement, scenically speaking.

But on the other hand, how did Magazine X, or its advertising firm, or the webmasters at the ad firm, or the purveyors of the bench grinders, or the Chinese wholesaler or manufacturer of the bench grinders, or Google, or whoever it was—how did they know I was looking at bench grinders a few days back?

Someone will perhaps say, “Oh, that’s just a cookie. Your browser ate a cookie and this is what happens.” Well, fine, but that doesn’t help me much in answering the question of who was responsible.

Transmute this experience to real life (as opposed to cyberspace, which, despite arguments to the contrary, lacks something of being the full equal of real life), and see how it sounds. Say you go into a hardware store one day and look at some bench grinders, without even talking to a salesperson. Then you get on a plane and fly 1500 miles to a different city. You need some money and go into a bank. While you’re waiting in line at the bank, a guy comes up to you wearing a lumpy trench coat, peels it open, and what has he got hanging inside? Bench grinders! “Wanna buy a bench grinder, Mr. Stephan?” he wheezes.

I don’t know about you, but it would creep me out to the extent I might call the cops. At the very least, I’d want to know how he found me, who he was working for, and what exactly the chain of causation was between my looking at bench grinders in City A on one day, and my being approached in City B several days later by a guy who knows for a petrified fact that I was looking for bench grinders earlier.

It’s gone beyond “caveat emptor”­—let the buyer beware. It’s now “caveat examinar”—let the browser (the person, not the software) beware. Anything you look at can be filed, compiled, bought, sold, and used to manipulate you later.

As invasions of privacy go, this was pretty minor. But there have been scams, often associated with pornographic websites, in which the fact that a person visits such a site is used to blackmail them in various ways. And even if what I’m looking at is perfectly legitimate, I resent the fact that somebody, or something, or some combination of persons and things, was spying on me as I looked at bench grinders, and used that information in a transfer that showed up in a completely unexpected context.

I would like to hear readers’ opinions about this sort of thing. Maybe you enjoy seeing your latest contemplated purchases plastered all over the next few websites you visit. Maybe you know exactly how this works and can explain it in non-technical language, and how to stymie it if you don’t like it. In any event, please let your opinions and thoughts be known. You will benefit more people than just me, and if you respond I’ll also know I haven’t lost all my readers by skipping a week.

Controversial iPhone Apps: Democracy or Despotism?

When millions of people communicate using a technology that is entirely under the control of a private firm, what obliges the firm to act less like a profit-making enterprise and more like a government? And if it does, what sort of government should it act like? These questions come up when we consider what recently happened to an iPhone application developed by Exodus International, which is (in its own words) “the world’s largest ministry to individuals and families impacted by homosexuality.”

From the start, Apple has held an extremely tight leash on iPhone apps sold through its official iTunes store. Developers must go through an elaborate application process, and reportedly any apps with explicit sexual content never make it through. (Full disclosure: I do not own an iPhone, and my sole connection with Apple is the fact that I use and own Mac computers.) Apparently, the app for Exodus International, which evidently just linked the user to other online resources, passed muster by Apple itself and went on sale some months ago. Then a Lesbian-Gay-Bisexual-Transsexual nonprofit group called Truth Wins Out started a petition on a website called Change.org to get Apple to pull the app. Eventually, 150,000 signatures were collected and presented to Apple, which removed it by March 24. A similar fate overtook an app related to the Manhattan Declaration last November. The Manhattan Declaration is a document which, among other things, reaffirms a commitment to traditional marriage. Reportedly only 10,000 signatures were needed to get the Manhattan Declaration pulled.

Reaction to the removal of Exodus International’s app was pretty bipolar, in the mathematical sense. People who favor the positions and activities of organizations like Exodus International thought it was a shame. As a signer of the Manhattan Declaration, I get updates from the organization and they sent out a notice about the Exodus International incident, which is how I found out about it. On the opposition side, comments ranged from the obscene to the nuanced. For an example of the more reasoned objections, here is a quote from a blooger named “sfbob” on the left-leaning Daily Kos website: “There are always serious questions to answer when it comes to what some would consider to be censorship. A couple of aspects of the situation however seemed to point me more in the direction of wanting the app removed. The app was somehow rated by Apple as being ‘suitable for all users’ (or words to that effect).” The blogger goes on to express concern that teenagers in doubt as to their sexuality might be harmed by the kind of information Exodus International provides. But his second point is the one I want to focus on. He writes, “In addition, it's arguable that the nature of an iTunes app does not really rise to the level of free speech.” As a private company, Apple has the ultimate right to decide what is and is not sold at their stores and used on their iPhones. So, according to sfbob, this right trumps any rights to free speech that might be advanced in favor of the app.

I will be among the first to agree that the right of free speech is not absolute. For example, I think it is a good thing that Apple won’t approve sexually explicit apps for the iPhone. I also think it is a good thing that child pornography is illegal, though you can probably find a few radical free-speech advocates under rocks and various places, who would oppose even those kinds of laws. And the classic example of a person who would go to jail for yelling “Fire!” in a crowded theater on April 1 to pull an April Fools joke shows that free speech is not an absolute right, but is rightly regulated by governments and laws for the protection of citizens who might otherwise be harmed.

That raises the next question: by what means should we regulate free speech? In a democracy, laws regulating free speech are originated by legislative bodies duly constituted to represent the will of the people, administered by an executive branch which is (ideally) also subject to the people, and adjudicated by judges who apply the laws in conformance to the people’s will as embodied in the laws. While this makes me sound like a starry-eyed idealist these days, I still think that is the best way to make law, including laws about free speech.

Contrast that to what happened in the cases of the Manhattan Declaration and Exodus International apps. A private firm offered some apps for sale, two out of many thousands of other apps dealing with all kinds of human activity. The apps themselves violated no law. Because of a perceived hazard to a group in which Truth Wins Out was interested, that private organization started a petition drive which ultimately collected 150,000 signatures. Presented with this evidence that a lot of people didn’t like the idea that Apple sold Exodus International’s app, Apple canned it.

How does petitioning differ from the formal legislative democratic process? In a number of ways. I doubt that any independent firm audited the petition process, which can easily be manipulated unless controls are in place similar to those used for petitions to gain access to running for elective office. Second, there is no publicly known rule by which Apple determines whether they will accede to the wishes expressed in a petition. The Daily Kos blogger noted that the petition to expunge the Manhattan Declaration app had only 10,000 signatures, while the Exodus International petition reached 150,000 before Apple acted. Are they raising the ante? Will the next petitioner need a million signatures? The reasoning of Apple is entirely opaque, as a private firm has a right to, well, privacy concerning its internal workings. But this is a profoundly undemocratic way to decide policies that affect millions of people.

Many observers, including yours truly, see Apple’s move as a politically tinged cave-in to a particular special interest group with which the company is at least on friendly terms. It shows that, at least where Apple is concerned, all you have to do to suppress free speech is to get some thousands of people to say they want Apple to do their bidding, and if Apple happens to agree, they get their wish. I can hardly wait to see what they get rid of next.

Sources: The blogosphere resounded with comments on this episode for a week or so. The reasoned Daily Kos comments can be read at http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/03/23/959459/-Goodbye-Exodus,-International-iPhone-app. The Exodus International website is at http://exodusinternational.org/, and the Manhattan Declaration can be read at http://www.manhattandeclaration.org/. By the way, the Manhattan Declaration itself has over 487,000 signatures.

U. S. Engineers: Not Without Honor Except In Their Own Country

One of the better-known sayings of Jesus is that a prophet is not without honor except in his own country. Another way of saying the same thing is the adage that an expert is just an ordinary guy who happens to be from out of town. The profession of engineering in the U. S. is not what public-relations firms would call “high-profile.” And when you hear statistics cited that China graduates 600,000 engineers every year compared to less than 100,000 in the U. S., you could be excused for thinking that the profession of engineering in the U. S. is headed the way of the Blockbuster video chain, which recently declared bankruptcy. But an interesting report a few years ago by a Duke University research group on global engineering and entrepreneurship shows these trends in a different light, and gives us at least some ideas about what to do.

Entitled “Where The Engineers Are,” the report says that when people take engineering graduation statistics from India and especially China at face value, they are unwittingly comparing apples and oranges. For one thing, the offshore statistics routinely count two- and three-year degrees the same as four-year bachelors’ degrees, which is not done in U. S. compilations. The numbers from China are not gathered in a uniform way and show some irregularities owing to a tremendous push on behalf of the government there to increase the number of engineering graduates. In India, there is no single agency charged with the responsibility of gathering engineering statistics of this type, so computer-science degrees are often mixed in with the engineering degrees, and there are some programs there which do not have an exact equivalent in the U. S. When the authors (who traveled to China and India as part of their research) asked managers of companies where they can get engineers comparable in background and quality to the “standard” product of U. S. engineering schools, the managers typically named only a few universities in their respective countries, out of the hundreds of institutes that are producing people who are counted as engineering graduates. So the picture that emerged was a two-tiered kind of affair: a few select universities graduating a relatively small number of engineers with the backgrounds typical of U. S. four-year schools, and a much larger and varied group of organizations producing the hundreds of thousands of people cited in the statistics, many of whom would not be classified as engineers in the U. S.

Does that mean there’s nothing to do and we can all go back to our knitting, so to speak? Not necessarily. An important aspect of any well-functioning profession is a sense of honor on behalf of its members: the notion that one belongs to a select group which is admired and looked up to by the general public, and whose reputation and integrity is therefore worth preserving by individual effort. Think of the recruiting ads put out by the U. S. Marine Corps, who are always looking for “a few good men.” While engineers rank fairly high in polls that ask what the most trusted professions are, pharmacists rank even higher. I don’t watch TV that much, but I don’t recall hearing about any TV shows starring a charismatic, handsome pharmacist. But lawyers, doctors, and even politicians and mobsters get that kind of exposure.

The kinds of people a culture honors says a lot about its desires and ambitions. In China, according to the Duke researchers, anyone who succeeds in publishing a research paper in an international journal is treated like a hero. But in the words of Rodney Daingerfield, it is only a slight exaggeration to say that in the U. S., engineers “don’t get no respect.”

This may be one reason why there is such a dearth of native U. S. students who pursue advanced degrees in engineering and the sciences. The result is that a majority of graduate students in these disciplines are from other countries, and while many of them stay here and contribute in positive ways that are out of proportion to their percentage of the population, an increasing number return to their native countries, where they can find highly prestigious management and technical positions.

What can be done, not only to better the situation of the engineering profession in this country, but to contribute to the global situation in a positive way? There are two basic approaches, which cast in economic terms are (1) restricting supply and (2) increasing demand. Some call for restrictive immigration policies that would make it harder for foreign citizens to either get advanced degrees in the U. S. or to stay here once they did. I favor the second approach, which is to make it easier for us to keep good foreign students and to attract more good students of any origin into programs that don’t require such severe financial sacrifices as present graduate programs do now.

One idea I haven’t seen much support for lately is the notion of changing the way we fund research in this country. Most of the research funds go to the researchers themselves, who then hire students on the open market at reduced rates compared to what the students could earn in industrial employment. What if we took a big chunk of money away from those guys (which includes me, by the way) and gave it to the best students instead, regardless of citizenship? You’d have to have some kind of competitive examination or other to find them, but once they got in, you could have favorable visas fast-tracked to the foreign students, and everybody who got in would get virtually a free ride financially to a graduate degree, as far as they wanted to pursue it. You’d need some time limits to prevent people from turning into perpetual graduate students, but that wouldn’t be hard. It would change the nature of the research business considerably, but schools and researchers would be competing for students with these new fellowships, rather than competing directly among each other for funding.

That’s the student end; how about the researcher and engineer end? There are awards for excellence in engineering and science, but they are definitely low-profile and scarcely cause a blip in the public consciousness or the media. I’m not in show business, but it sure seems like you could jazz up these kinds of awards with a little Academy-Award style of publicity. That goes against the grain of most engineers I know, but in a world of hyped media, the person who speaks quietly in a normal tone of voice is simply not heard.

Well, I’ve gone on too long with some half-baked ideas on how to make engineering a more prestigious activity in the U. S. In the long run, though, it will be determined by those who take our place, the next generation, and I just hope that they look upon our profession with more respect than it has received recently.

Sources: The Duke University report “Where The Engineers Are” can be downloaded at http://www.soc.duke.edu/globalengineering/papers_whereengineers.php and was published in the Spring 2007 issue of Issues in Science and Technology. I obtained the information on a Gallup poll of most trusted professions from a news report from 2009 at http://www.cnsnews.com/node/58362.

Prophet of the Nuclear Apocalypse: Keith Snow on the Japanese Nuclear Disaster

Last week when I commented on the nuclear disaster that followed the tsunami and earthquake in Japan on Mar. 11, my estimate of the eventual outcome was guardedly optimistic. A week and several explosions and fires later, no one has been able to get close enough to the damaged reactors to make a thorough assessment of the situation, and radiation is starting to show up in water and the food chain in Japan, although initially at low levels. And after reading the grim prophetic words of Keith Snow, I have a different viewpoint altogether to consider.

Mr. Snow is an independent investigative journalist whose courageous and iconoclastic efforts to reveal hidden agendas, systemic lies, and outrageous wrongs have won him numerous awards. He was also a student of mine many years ago at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and spent several years as an engineer in the military-industrial complex before experiencing a change of heart. He has turned his considerable technical abilities and understanding to writing accurate, informed reports on things that the usual media outlets seldom cover, at least in the way Mr. Snow covers them.

In the Old Testament of the Bible, every now and then God would send a prophet to his people the Jews. The prophet’s job was not a pleasant one. If the people had been behaving well, they wouldn’t have needed a prophet to draw their attention to their misdeeds. As a usual thing, the prophet was ignored at best, and mocked, scorned, jailed, or killed at worst. Because the prophet’s message threatened the status quo and the vested interests of the powerful, he rarely found a large audience. But the sign of a true prophet was truth: telling it like it was, and sometimes foretelling events that later came to pass.

Keith Snow is a modern-day prophet. He’s aware of this: his blog on the Japanese nuclear disaster at http://www.consciousbeingalliance.com/2011/03/japans-catastrophic-nuclear-power-cover-up/ begins with a quotation from the New Testament about false prophets. He doesn’t quite come out and say he’s the real McCoy, but the implication is clear. As with other reporting he’s done, he sticks to one or two consistent themes.

One theme is the way that corporate interests move heaven and earth to protect themselves, through exerting influence on commercial media by advertising, on politicians through donations and lobbying, and by exploiting powerless populations by neglecting basic safety and health issues that might cost too much. Mr. Snow has a deeply critical view of commercial (i. e. corporation-controlled) media, which nowadays includes almost everything except independent bloggers such as himself. He describes in his current blog how the major media outlets such as the New York Times have skewed their coverage of the nuclear disaster in Japan to favor corporate interests such as those of General Electric, which is responsible for the reactor designs that failed during the earthquake. He shows how corporate-friendly experts have downplayed the danger of radioactive isotope releases from the damaged plants, and cites hard facts straight from scientific tables to show that materials like cesium-137 and strontium-90 are not items that you want showing up in your dinner salad—or anywhere else nearby, not for many, many years. He harshly (and correctly, I believe) rakes the plant designs over the coals for a number of basic flaws that have been at least partially corrected in some later designs—but the Japanese electric utilities wanted to recover their substantial investments in the older technology, at least up to last week when the whole complex was apparently written off in efforts to stop the crisis. Just for the sake of balance, I would urge anyone who read my post last week on the nuclear crisis in Japan to read Mr. Snow’s much more detailed and technically deep analysis of the situation.

Mr. Snow and I have some philosophical differences, but that does not keep me from recognizing the importance of paying attention to voices like his. I will admit that sometimes, after reading one of his more vitriolic analyses of a current commercial technology such as nuclear power, the use of fossil fuels, or the Wild-West-style mining of a technologically important mineral such as coltan, I want to sit him down and ask him, “Okay, these terrible consequences have resulted from the corporation-dominated market operating internationally to produce and satisfy technological needs and wants of millions or billions of people. If you were king for a year, or a decade, how would you do things differently? Would you take the Distributist line and prohibit the existence of any corporation larger than a certain size? And how pray tell would you enforce such a law?” It is a conversation I have never had with him, but I keep looking for hints in his writings of how it would proceed. I don’t see many.

As a teacher in an electrical engineering program, I believe that acquiring technical knowledge for the purposes of commercial development of engineered products and services is a net societal good. Yes, it can cause trouble. Yes, people can be killed, deprived of liberty, impoverished, or otherwise harmed by wrongly made technology. But I still believe the technological enterprise is worth pursuing, although perhaps with a much greater awareness of its long-term effects than has been customary in the past.

This may sound strange, but a culture can’t stop and think too much about what it’s doing, or else it risks the chance of general paralysis. The heart must be involved as well as the head. This is not a criticism of Mr. Snow—his journalism clearly involves his heart as well as his head, probably more than most journalism does. What I am trying to say is, we need to hear words like Mr. Snow’s, not only after a disaster that happens, but before other disasters in order that they may not happen. The proper response is not to cease building engineered things altogether, but to build them more responsibly and wiser. And the working out of what that means can take a lifetime.

It is the nature of a prophet’s words that one cannot judge their correctness at the time they are spoken. Some of the things Mr. Snow speaks of in his nuclear disaster blog may not come to pass for years, or decades, or centuries. Only generations in the far future will be able to make a truly informed judgment on the rightness of his words. To those of us in the present, Mr. Snow’s words pose a challenge: do you believe him? And if so, to what degree? And that, dear reader, is a decision that you must make for yourself.

Nuclear Power Meltdown in Japan?

As I write this on Sunday evening (U. S. Central Daylight Time), it is Monday morning in Japan, and nuclear engineers continue to struggle with several damaged nuclear power plants in the northern part of Japan. They were damaged in last Friday’s massive magnitude-8.9 earthquake and tsunami. Our prayers and thoughts are with the people of Japan, who are dealing with the worst catastrophe to hit their islands since World War II. It is likely that thousands have died, and about half a million people have been displaced from their homes. Many months will pass before life in Japan returns to something near normal. The question I would like to ask is: will “normal” life in Japan include nuclear power?

To my knowledge, no nuclear plant in the history of the world has ever been subjected to an 8.9-magnitude earthquake before now. Prior to last week’s temblor, Japan was well known for designing nuclear reactors with extremely high standards for safety in the face of all kinds of malfunctions and problems, including earthquakes. The fact that Japan uses nuclear power at all is somewhat impressive, given the fact that it is the only country where people were killed by nuclear weapons in war (Hiroshima and Nagasaki). Conscious of the technology’s history, Japanese nuclear engineers have probably devised the safest possible systems consistent with making a reasonable profit and making a viable contribution to their country’s power industry. But every design has intentional limits, and informed sources say that the plants were not designed to withstand an earthquake the size of the one that hit last Friday.

Despite the magnitude of the shock, it appears that the containment vessels surrounding the radioactive cores have done their job so far. The main problems have been that at several plants, notably the Fukushima No. 1 unit, both the main and the auxiliary electric power failed. Nuclear reactors work by producing huge amounts of heat that is carried away ultimately to make steam that runs electric generators. In pressurized-water reactors (evidently the type in question), the heat is transported by rapidly flowing pressurized water. Any interruption in this flow traps heat in the radioactive core, sending its temperature soaring to the point that the zirconium-encased uranium fuel rods can crack and release radioactive byproducts. The absolute worst-case scenario is not a nuclear-bomb-type of explosion, but a so-called “meltdown” in which the fuel rods melt through the floor of the containment vessel into the ground. The resulting release of radioactive material is a serious problem.

So far, this has not apparently happened. However, short of that ultimate disaster, some other disturbing things can and did occur. Hot zirconium oxidizes, and when it gets in contact with water, a chemical (not nuclear) reaction releases hydrogen gas, which can build up to a concentration that causes a plain old chemical explosion. This has happened in at least one plant, blowing off some of the outer structure of the plant and releasing some radioactive gas. But the amounts are small and nothing like what happened at Chernobyl, for example.

In 1986, an accident at the graphite-moderated nuclear plant in Chernobyl (in the present country of Ukraine) set fire to the graphite and spread deadly amounts of radiation for many miles. By almost any measure, the Chernobyl plant was badly designed, and nothing like the radioactive fire that happened there could occur at the Japanese plants.

Nevertheless, things are still dicey. Even if the nuclear reaction is shut down by emergency flooding or moderator-rod insertion, you still have a tremendous amount of heat to deal with, and the failure of the cooling-water pumps means that the reactors have already overheated and sustained a certain amount of damage. And of course, most of the instrumentation that engineers would normally use to figure out what is going on inside the plants has also gone flooey. Plus, nobody wants to get near the things with radioactive fuel sloshing around. Possibly it is a job for some radiation-hardened robots. If there are any such things, you can bet they have them in Japan and they’re trying to use them now.

A late report mentions that engineers working with at least one plant have thrown in the towel, and are pumping seawater mixed with boron into one reactor vessel. This is a last-ditch emergency measure that will cool the reactor core fast, but will also corrode it to the point of destruction. It’s likely that the reactor was beyond salvaging anyway, but this action seals its fate. At this point, this is an appropriate action that puts public safety ahead of the power company’s investment.

The future of Japan’s nuclear industry may depend on how well the damaged plants are handled, and also how well the news of any releases of radioactivity is dealt with. If the reactor failures were the only problem, it would be a huge crisis, but the Japanese public currently has other things on its mind besides a little radioactive gas floating around amid the devastation of the earthquake and tsunami.

It’s hard to say, but it looks like the Japanese nuclear engineers will handle this situation with courage and good judgment. The reactors will cool, eventually someone will get inside to assess the damage, and some of the power plants will have to be written off. My guess is that Japan will decide to keep using nuclear power, but may increase even further the already rigorous standards for future plant construction, learning from whatever lessons this tragedy has taught us.

Sources: I relied on news reports from CNN at http://www.cnn.com/2011/WORLD/asiapcf/03/13/japan.nuclear.reactors/index.html?hpt=T1 and the Los Angeles Times at http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-sci-japan-quake-reactor-qa-20110314,0,3403230.story.

Daniel Bell, the Post-Industrial Society, and Engineering

Daniel Bell was a Harvard sociologist who died at the age of 91 last January. He is perhaps best known for inventing the phrase “post-industrial society” in the 1970s to describe a transition that was only beginning to take place in the United States back then. I’d like to speculate a little on the contributions of engineers to that transition, and whether post-industrial society is an unequivocally good thing.

Perhaps the first modern industrial society came into being in Great Britain in the late 1800s, where the Scientific Revolution and Industrial Revolutions combined with a commerce-friendly government and culture to lead to tremendous growth of mass manufacturing and exchange of mass-produced goods. Transportation and communications technologies were an essential part of this transition, because the mere making of 100,000 widgets is a pretty pointless endeavor if you can’t agree to sell them fast (e. g. the use of telegrams and the telephone by businesses) and ship them to customers nearly as fast (e. g. on railroads and steamships). The U. S. was an even more fertile ground for industrialization than England in some ways, and once World War II temporarily flattened nearly every other country’s industrial base, the U. S. entered what is increasingly looking in retrospect like a unique Golden Age of industrialization.

Industrialized societies are physical-thing-based: the making and using of things is what they are all about. The things can be big (modern buildings, cities) or small (computers, microchips) but they are physical objects that are assembled, bought, sold, shipped, and owned. Bell’s insight was to see that a different kind of society was in the cards: one in which things, although necessary to the functioning of the new kind of society, were not the main event. What web developers like to call “content,”—what Bell described in terms of data, information, and knowledge—was to be the main product of post-industrial society. This transition from industrial to post-industrial was to have huge implications for the makeup of society as a whole, and for the kinds of workers needed as well.

By many criteria, Bell got it right. Perhaps the most obvious measure of the transition is the movement from manufacturing to service employment. The category of services, which counts everything from janitors to judges, has always been a larger component than manufacturing once most people moved off the farm, but in 1970 there were only about two service workers for every manufacturing worker. By 2005, the proportion was five service workers for every manufacturing employee.

Another way that Bell’s idea was confirmed is in the types of business that attract attention and young workers. In 1970, quite possibly the best a high-school graduate could do was to find a factory job that demanded semi-skilled manual labor. The wages and benefits (often guaranteed by a union contract) were enough to start a family on, and job security was good. In 2011, good luck finding such a job. The unemployment rate among native-born U. S. citizens aged 18-29 with only a high-school diploma is about 20% as of last fall. And those who are employed get jobs that barely can make ends meet for a single person. As for raising a family or getting married (increasingly in that order), it is a dubious proposition at best.

What have engineers got to do with all this? Engineering is both an industrial and a post-industrial job category. Engineers were needed to design the cornucopia of material goods that built the industrial economies of the world, and engineers likewise devised the computer networks, software, and auxiliary tools and concepts necessary for the modern film, video game, and financial trading industries—the kinds of activities that make up a post-industrial economy. As I have noted elsewhere, engineers tend to have a narrow focus on the technical task to be done, to the neglect of its wider implications for society as a whole. Not only engineers, but most people discussing modern economies tend to operate with some unspoken assumptions I would like to at least question.

To put it a little too broadly, what is life for? The unspoken answer to this question that usually is assumed by all parties is, “To produce and consume—especially consume.” In a way, the transition from industrial to post-industrial hasn’t questioned that assumption. Instead of buying new, improved toasters and refrigerators and cars, we’re now buying new and improved DVDs, computer games, and versions of Microsoft Excel. Both kinds of economies demand that people earn enough money to consume the products made—and that’s where a problem is showing up.

Every cohort of young people is made up of some who will make brilliant lawyers, doctors, scientists, or engineers—and a whole lot more who won’t. But if we increasingly move toward an economy in which the only people who can earn a decent living need advanced degrees and the brainpower required to obtain those degrees, we will end up with a situation more typical of developing countries: a small, pampered, wealthy elite living in walled compounds to keep out the impoverished, ill-fed and ill-clad masses who live from hand to mouth. This is frankly the way most societies were organized over the centuries, but that doesn’t mean it’s the best way. To have a solid, prosperous middle class, one needs solid middle-class jobs for them—jobs within the reach of most people with average smarts. But that’s not what’s happening.

We are trying to compensate for the problem by making more and more people go to college for longer and longer periods. This is good in some ways, but it runs against biology in several respects, notably the fact that we are set up (by evolution or God, depending on your point of view) to marry and have children around the age of 20 at the latest. The Amish solve this problem by amputating education at the eighth grade. The young people who choose to stay Amish (and there is usually a time when they are given a choice) become farmers or craftsmen, marry and have children at 18 or 20, and live quiet, unremarkable, pre-industrial lives, most of them. But if everybody quit what they’re doing now and tried to be Amish, we’d run out of farmland in about two seconds.

I said I’d raise a question. I didn’t say I knew the answer. Responses to this blog, as always, are more than welcome.

Sources: I relied on the Wikipedia article on Daniel Bell, and used information from the websites http://jobs.stateuniversity.com/pages/16/American-Workplace-SHIFT-SERVICE-ECONOMY.html and http://www.marketoracle.co.uk/Article23764.html for employment statistics.

Do Cell Phones Make Your Brain Hungry?

People are often afraid of things they don’t understand. The way cell phones work is a mystery to most people, if by “mystery” we mean something that we may understand on a basic level, but something that has indefinite levels of complexity that we do not comprehend. By that definition, most pieces of electronic gear are mysteries even to their designers, because no one person any longer has an exhaustive understanding of all the pieces that go into a cell phone: the microprocessors, the RF circuits, the digital signal processing, the details of the semiconductor fabrication design, etc. Each designer knows his or her little bit, but no one any longer understands the whole thing exhaustively.

And the mysteries of cell phones pale when compared to the mysteries of the brain. Though we have just begun to be able to measure certain things about the brain, such as how much glucose it metabolizes where, this is just like studying an advanced computer based on how much power different parts of it consume, without being able to measure the actual signals inside. In either case, you could make some broad generalizations and correlations, but detailed understanding would be beyond your grasp.

So it’s not surprising that a recent article in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) showing a relationship between cell-phone use and brain metabolism got a lot of attention. The interaction between cell phones and the brain has got to be one of the most thoroughly studied matters in the history of medical science and electrical engineering. As cell phone use grew in the 1980s and 1990s, both industry and government labs studied nearly every possible way that the radio-frequency emissions from cell phones could affect the brain. No one denies that the watt-level or less power emitted from a cell phone causes a very slight warming of tissue. So does sitting out in the sun, for that matter. But if you dig down into the worst fears of the average member of the cell-phone-using public, you might find something like this: twenty years down the road, large numbers of people who have used cell phones extensively will all come down with some horrible incurable form of brain cancer and die lingering, mentally incapacitated deaths, all because they wouldn’t put down the durn phone.

The actual finding, by members of the National Institutes on Drug Abuse and Brookhaven National Laboratory, was a lot less serious than that. In the normal course of business, the brain metabolizes glucose from the blood to obtain energy for its operations. This is how the brain eats, so to speak. Positron-emission tomography (PET) combined with a special type of glucose-containing chemical allows brain scientists to measure the energy consumption, as it were, of different parts of the brain in real time. When they put cell phones next to both ears of 47 healthy test subjects for 50 minutes and turned one on (presumably they didn’t tell the subjects which one was on and which one wasn’t), they found that the parts of the brain closest to the phone antenna used 35.7 micromoles of glucose per minute per 100 grams of brain tissue. The other side used 33.3 micromoles. In other words, the side of the brain nearest the phone used about 7% more glucose than the other side. They are quite confident about the statistics of this result, but say that their finding is “of unknown clinical significance.”

My own uninformed guess is that the slight heating effect of the absorbed RF waves affected the brain’s sensitive temperature-regulating mechanism, and possibly increased blood circulation in that area as a result, producing more glucose use as a side effect. Obviously, more research is required, at a minimum another study showing that this effect is repeatable. Until that is done, the scientifically responsible thing to do is to suspend judgment, not get into a panic about using cell phones.

As I have said in other contexts, engineers should not ignore the public perception that cell phone use might damage your brain in some way. It’s something the industry must deal with, and is as real as consumer attitudes about price, color, service features, or anything else to do with a product. A report by Kent German on CNET stated that the Cellular Telecommunications Industry Association played up the “unknown clinical significance” aspect of the JAMA report, which is understandable. They could hardly be expected to embrace it with open arms. But as they point out, this is not the first time researchers have investigated the relationship between cell-phone use and brain activity. This study is unusual in that a definite statistical correlation was found, but whether the change in metabolism is harmful is just not known at this time. And the fact that this almost inconsequential finding has received so much publicity has to do with our attitude toward science as the ultimate authority in more and more aspects of life.

Every age has authority figures to which it looks for guidance. In the Middle Ages it was the Church, by and large. Since the nineteenth century, science has largely replaced other authorities as the recognized way of resolving questions of wider and wider significance, whether or not it makes sense to approach a problem in a scientific way, meaning armed with statistical studies and correlation calculations.

It’s hard to bear in mind that not all of life is best approached in that way. I rarely carry a cell phone, and turn it on even less often than I carry it. This is most assuredly not because I’m afraid of the RF radiation it emits. As an amateur-radio operator in my younger days, I got exposed to way more RF than most cell-phone users will take in from cell phones in their lifetimes. Once I even got burned—literally—on my thumb when I was working on an antenna, and a fellow amateur didn’t check my location before he keyed the transmitter. I am happy to report that the small scar healed in a week or so and my thumb has survived intact to this day.

I simply prefer to live my life without the added annoyance of having some telemarketer interrupt my already precarious chain of thought, or my dinner with my wife, or any number of other activities that were formerly sacrosanct from electronic perturbation. This has nothing to do with statistics, and everything to do with my sanity. Other people, including my wife, have decided differently, for good reasons. They carry cell phones and turn them on, and that is fine. If you want to limit your cell phone use for reasons to do with how you live, that makes sense. But don’t get rid of it because you’re afraid of brain cancer. There are a lot more sensible things to be afraid of, at least as far as we know now.

Sources: An abstract of the JAMA report referred to in this blog is freely accessible at http://jama.ama-assn.org/content/305/8/808.short, and Kent German’s Feb. 23, 2011 CNET article on the CTIA reaction (and other thoughts of his) can be found at http://www.cnet.com/8301-17918_1-20035614-85.html?tag=mncol;mlt_related.

Jaron Lanier and his Six Web Commandments

You would think that a person who was doing virtual-reality experiments in the 1980s, someone who wears dreadlocks and plays obscure musical instruments professionally, and someone who just wrote a book criticizing most of what we’re familiar with about the WorldWideWeb would not have much in common. Well, they turn out to be the same person: Jaron Lanier, who is Scholar at Large with Microsoft Corporation, among several other of his hats. And he published a book last year called You Are Not a Gadget that has enough unique perspectives on engineering ethics problems to give me ideas for several blogs. Today I’ll stick to just one: the danger that the web is about to lock us into pernicious frameworks and habits that may do permanent damage to cultures worldwide.

The easiest way to understand what he’s saying is to consider the idea of the inner troll. This is Lanier’s phrase for the way normally decent and polite people sometimes turn into writers of nasty, ill-tempered, and vicious attacks in comments on blogs and other online forums, under cover of anonymity. Anyone who has spent time on popular websites where anonymous comments are allowed has noticed how ugly people tend to be when they take sides on a controversial issue. (The non-controversial ones rarely attract comments.) It doesn’t matter what the subject is, and whether the visitors are beer-drinking football fans or musicologists with perfect pitch and Ph. D’s. Sooner or later, the discussions degenerate into the kind of name-calling and personal attacks that most people still shy away from in face-to-face encounters (I hope). On some occasions involving teenagers, the pressure from hateful online mobs has even driven a few victims to suicide. Why is this?

Although Lanier isn’t sure, he has some ideas. One problem is the fact that anonymity is almost a default setting on many websites, while it takes extra effort to identify yourself in a way that can be traced back to your true name or address. This is one of the “locked-in” features of the web that is pretty hard to reverse without making folks go through a lot of identification hassle that would discourage commenting at all. Lanier explains that the first Internet users were all physicists at a few large labs, most of them knew each other, and most of them had no concern, or even a vague notion, that anyone on the web would ever be less than polite and professional. Well, this was one of those little features of human behavior that got overlooked as one of several competing versions of how the web should work took over. And now we are more or less stuck with it.

Another problem he identifies might be termed the homogenization of personhood. Contrast the old-fashioned handwritten letter from one friend to another with the impression of a person you can get from a typical Facebook page. Back in the day, you could often tell who wrote the letter simply by the handwriting style of the address on the envelope. Your friend’s handwriting became as familiar to you as his face, and everyone’s unique writing style conveyed more sense of personality, even down to repetitive phrases that could be simultaneously annoying and endearing.

By contrast, a lot of material on a Facebook page derives from a few bits that represent yes-or-no answers to a limited set of canned questions: age, sex, “single” or “attached,” and a few others. And the more skillfully a Facebook page is designed to put forward an appealing personality, the more successful it is, generally speaking, at everything but sincerity. As Lanier puts it, “The deep meaning of personhood is being reduced by illusions of bits.” While any communications medium inevitably reduces a holistic experience to a limited range of information, the digital medium of the web is particularly reductive. And because it’s so widespread, its effects may be more pervasive than any previous technology, perhaps including the invention of the printing press.

Lanier thinks that while it’s too late to change some things about the web, it’s not too late for others. He gives a list of practical suggestions that each user of the web can act on. While a few people who follow these rules will not revolutionize the web overnight, I think the philosophy behind these ideas will move us in the right direction. Here they are, from page 21 of You Are Not a Gadget:

1. Don’t post anonymously unless you really might be in danger.

2. If you put effort into Wikipedia articles, put even more effort into using your personal voice and expression outside of the wiki to help attract people who don’t yet realize that they are interested in the topics you contributed to.

3. Create a website that expresses something about who you are that won’t fit into the template available to you on a social networking site.

4. Post a video once in a while that took you one hundred times more time to create than it takes to view.

5. Write a blog post that took weeks of reflection before you heard the inner voice that needed to come out.

6. If you are twittering, innovate in order to find a way to describe your internal state instead of trivial external events, to avoid the creeping danger of believing that objectively described events define you, as they would define a machine.

If everyone followed these rules, I think the web experience for everyone would be much better. No. 1 by itself would rid the world of most spam, for instance. Of course it is idealistic to think this might happen, but that’s what ideals are for. Even if you never reach them, just by trying to you naturally go in the right direction.

At the risk of flattering my readers, I will say that I have rarely if ever encountered any Inner Trolls trying to post comments on this site. I view all the submitted comments, and allow ones in that I think contribute to the conversation, regardless of whether they agree with or oppose my own view. Most of the ones I reject are machine-generated spam or so short and content-free that there’s no point in posting them. The result is something that I think is in the spirit of Lanier’s Six Commandments. While few of my posts are the product of weeks of reflection, I do think about them for more than the hour or so it takes to write them. As I said, there is a lot more in Lanier’s book worth pondering, so you may read about him again here soon.

Sources: You Are Not a Gadget by Jaron Lanier was published in 2010 by Afred A. Knopf.

Modular Nuclear Plants: About Time?

Last week, the Obama administration proposed to spend a half billion dollars over the next five years to design modular nuclear power plants that would be cheaper and easier to build than the plants we have now. The idea is a good one—the question is, will it happen?

First, why is it a good idea? What about nuclear waste? What about the dangers of terrorist attacks on the plants? What about nuclear’s unparalleled horrific legacy as the direct descendant of nuclear weapons, and the danger that nuclear fuel will end up in the wrong hands, hands that turn it into a bomb?

These are all good questions. As a practical engineer, my first thought is to look around and see if anyone’s done it right, and ask how they did it. I need look no farther than France, where the centralized government agency in charge of nuclear matters had this uniform-design modular idea, or something a lot like it, around 1965. The result? To the best of my knowledge, no one has stolen French nuclear fuel to make a weapon, no one has mounted a successful terrorist attack on a French nuclear plant, France is a leader in technology that actually recycles some nuclear waste, and most French citizens have a favorable or at least neutral view of nuclear power. Today, France generates about 70% of its electricity with an array of nuclear plants that come in only three sizes: small, medium, and large. In fact, their plants make so much electricity that France is the largest net exporter of electric power in the world. And modular, standardized construction practices are a large part of why the French nuclear effort has been such a success.

In the U. S., however, the picture is more cloudy. In 2010, only 17% of our electric power was produced by nuclear energy, and all of that was from plants at least 15 years old. No nuclear plant has been completed in the U. S. since 1996. There are several reasons for this.

Up through the 1970s, nuclear power in the U. S. was a growth industry that had a bright future. Then a couple of accidents—the Three Mile Island core meltdown in Pennsylvania in 1979, and the disastrous fire in the Chernobyl nuclear plant in the former USSR in 1986—cast a pall over what was already becoming an increasingly controversial way of generating power. The nuclear-plant construction industry was also partly to blame in not coming up with a reliable, predictable way of building standardized plants that worked. Their task was hampered by a moving target of increasing government licensing and construction requirements, which made the last batch of nuclear plants to be built exceedingly uneconomical. Vast cost overruns and some utility bankruptcies led to a complete shutdown of construction of new nuclear plants by the mid-90s. Although there are now signs that the nuclear freeze is beginning to thaw, the deregulation of the electric-power industry in the last decade or so means that investors look even harder at the economics of nuclear power than they used to. And they should. Good engineering is always about economics at some level, and companies who hope to succeed in this business have to figure out how to make nuclear plants effective, safe, and profitable.

Politically, a hard core of opposition to nuclear power in any way, shape, or form developed and took over the conversation by the 1980s. This vociferous minority tends to attract much media attention, and has strongly colored the public perception of nuclear energy. The industry’s proponents are not nearly as concentrated, focused, or energetic, so the minority tends to get most of the attention. Engineers in favor of nuclear power have not always considered the fact that ignoring a public perception based on wrong information, will not make that public perception go away.

For example, suppose a person opposes the construction of a new nuclear plant ten miles away from his house because of fear that the radiation emitted from it in normal operation will shorten his lifetime. I’m not saying that’s the only reason people oppose nuclear power, but it is one reason some people cite. You can sit down with such a person and show them reams of statistics to the effect that if they smoke, or drive a car, or do any number of other things that people do routinely, their chances of dying from one of these other ordinary activities is vastly greater than the miniscule risk of getting cancer from the slight additional background of radiation from a nuclear plant—if indeed there is any added risk at all. But the perception is there, and too many engineers simply sweep aside such beliefs by saying they are irrational. But an irrational belief that someone holds will still affect their behavior, and their attitudes, and the way they vote.

There is one relatively new argument in favor of nuclear power: the fact that it is the most reliable and well-developed way to generate electricity without adding to the world’s carbon footprint. Whether or not you believe global warming is the worst crisis of our time, we can all agree that reducing our reliance on fossil fuels (whether domestic coal or imported oil) is a good thing, other matters being equal. And nuclear power does that in spades. I suspect this is one of the main motivations behind the Obama administration’s embrace of limited nuclear energy, which to their credit they have been fairly consistent about.

A Federally sponsored design exercise is one thing. But until Federal, state, and local governments modify the currently cumbrous and Byzantine nuclear licensing and approval process, I suspect the present deregulated electric-power industry is going to be reluctant to put a lot of money into nuclear power, despite its environmental advantages. In France, sustained and intelligent government direction led to a global success story in nuclear energy. Let us hope that something similar might happen here, although the paths we take will look very different from what happened in France.

Sources: The New York Times online edition carried a report on the Obama administration’s proposal for modular nuclear plant design on Feb. 13, 2011 at http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/13/science/earth/13nuke.html. I also consulted the Wikipedia article “Nuclear power in France” and obtained the statistic on the percentage of U. S. electricity generated by nuclear power from the U. S. Department of Energy website http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricity/epm/epm_sum.html.

Freezing Texans In the Dark: Engineering Rolling Blackouts

Last Wednesday, thousands of Texans experienced something that, to the best of my knowledge, is unprecedented in the history of the state. A combination of extremely low temperatures, weather-caused generating plant failures, and poor planning led to the need to cut off electric power for several hours or more in widespread regions of Central and North Texas. My house was in one of the affected regions, and so about 5:20 AM that morning I found myself hunting in the dark for flashlights and wondering if someone had driven into a power utility pole nearby. We experienced more blackouts intermittently the rest of the morning, and my university cancelled afternoon classes out of concerns that people would get trapped in elevators. Later that day I learned the reason: a short-term shortage of generating capacity forced the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) to order its member utilities to shed loads systematically in a series of rolling blackouts to prevent the whole system from going down in an uncontrolled way. There is both good news and bad news in the reports of why this happened and how decisions were made.

The good news is that the old “hold on till you can’t anymore” attitude that led in the 1960s to regional or national power blackouts is a thing of the past. With modern instrumentation and modeling software, operators can tell when their power grid is getting close to the brink and organize deliberate actions such as rolling blackouts to prevent a total system collapse. That is what operators in California had to do a few years ago during extremely hot weather and an energy crisis, and that is what ERCOT did last week. Relatively short local blackouts of a few “circuits” (distribution areas) at a time are much preferable to a disorganized collapse that affects everybody, including critical loads such as hospitals, rest homes, and semiconductor plants, for whom a power failure means endangering lives or the immediate loss of millions of dollars of product and equipment.

But the bad news is that we had rolling blackouts at all. Texas is unique among the 48 contiguous states in that its power grid is largely independent of surrounding regions. When other grids have trouble, this helps us get through unscathed, but by the same token, the state has to generate the vast majority of the power it uses within its own borders. Consequently there are some 500 or so generating plants in Texas, about 50 of which were off line last Wednesday for one reason or another. Reports are still coming in about why so many plants were down, but the most significant factor was the weather: it was 18 degrees F here in San Marcos, halfway between San Antonio and Austin, and proportionally colder as you went north. Evidently power-plant operators, whose machinery is mostly outdoors and exposed to the wind and icy temperatures, did not uniformly plan in advance for such low temperatures. Pipes froze or burst, machinery failed to start, and even many of the natural-gas-fired emergency plants designed for short-term supplemental use in just such a crisis couldn’t be started. The reason? Atmos Energy, the main natural-gas supplier, was having its own problems keeping gas pressure up to residential customers, so it exercised its contractual right to reduce pressure to large-scale industrial users, including—you guessed it—power plants. So we shot ourselves in the foot on that one.

ERCOT and its member utilities have since come in for a lot of criticism about the way the blackouts were distributed. It turns out that the firms had lists of “protected” loads which were not to be interrupted under rolling-blackout conditions: places like the aforementioned hospitals, nursing homes, and semiconductor plants. There were so many of these protected loads in so many circuits that the burden of the blackouts fell on a relatively few residential and commercial districts, with reports of some sections losing power for as long as eight hours.

What lessons can be learned from this experience? Surely a lot of power-plant owners are reviewing their cold-weather contingency plans, and the next time such an unusual cold snap hits I hope more plants will stay on line. Everybody now knows about the lists of protected loads, and after such public exposure perhaps a dialog about the wisdom of such lists can lead to improvements or changes if necessary. And clearly, just because something is in a contract doesn’t mean that it’s a wise thing to do. Cutting gas pressure to power plants in an emergency when you need more power plants, not less, is just the kind of bureaucratic messup that needs coordination at a higher level, perhaps with state government involvement if necessary.

But beyond these tactical issues lies a more strategic question: does this experience tell us something about changes in the level of commitment and planning in the electric-utility industry after several years of deregulation? Compared to thirty years ago, the industry is much more diversified, independent of government, and competitive, although these changes are only a matter of degree. The concern I have always had about extensive utility deregulation is that in the struggle for profits, the customer’s needs would be left behind. Under normal conditions this concern has largely proved groundless, and at least in many parts of Texas customers now have a choice about who they buy their electricity from. (That is not the case for people who live in cities that own the electric utility, such as San Marcos.) But the relationship between one customer and a particular electric provider proved illusory when ERCOT exercised what amounted to dictatorial control over the entire system to preserve its integrity.

On the whole, this control was exercised wisely. One wonders whether the problem would have occurred under the old regulated system of guaranteed profits, when generating, transmitting, and distributing equipment was typically under one ownership and profits were generous enough to allow overkill in maintenance and cold-weather protection, as well as a little surplus for extravagances like research, for instance. We will never know. I confess a little hurt pride at the thought that rolling blackouts, which I associate (rightly or wrongly) mainly with developing countries, actually affected my home state of Texas. I hope this is not a trend, and that the lessons learned from this unique experience help us avoid another one in the future.

Sources: I used reports from various issues of the Austin American-Statesman over the last week (see http://www.statesman.com/ for specific reports on the rolling blackouts of Feb. 2, 2011).