Nukeelor Power

People used to mispronounce the word "nuclear", all the time.  It's an easy word to pronounce correctly because it is pronounced exactly the way its spelling indicates that it should be.  But a lot of people used to muck it up.  For reasons that I never understood the "cle" part would throw them.  They acted as if it was actually spelled "cel".  Many of those people where public figures who should have known better.  And many of them continued to mispronounce the word for years.  Where were their aides and assistants?

If you are in favor of nuclear power, as I am, things have definitely improved.  At a minimum, the rate at which the word "nuclear" is mispronounced has diminished considerably.  But pronouncing the word incorrectly is of minor importance in the grand scheme of things.  The good news is that there have been improvements in far more important areas too.  But the press has continued to focus what coverage they provide on the less important areas while almost completely ignoring the more important areas.

I dug into this subject in 2020.  I put up two good posts, "Sigma 5: A Brief History of Nuclear Power", and "Sigma 5: Nuclear Waste", in that year.  I recommend both of them.  This post will build on the foundation they lay.  As I noted in those posts, there are two kinds of nuclear processes that can be used to produce power, fusion and fission.  Power generation using nuclear fission has been a commercial reality since the '50s.  It continues in use to this day.  Fusion has been "the future of nuclear power" for almost as long.

In practice, each depends on a single fuel.  With fission it's Uranium.  With fusion it's Hydrogen.  Fission based power is an outgrowth of research done to create the Atomic Bomb.  One main path to fusion-based power generation is based on research done to create the Hydrogen bomb.  The other main path uses a more esoteric approach that is less closely tied to bomb research.

Let's start with the latter.  It takes extreme conditions to make two Hydrogen atoms to fuse together to form a single Helium atom.  Those extreme conditions exist in the center of all stars including our Sun.  Most stars are like our Sun in that the fuel that powers them is Hydrogen.  Stars eventually exhaust their supplies of Hydrogen.  Our Sun will do so in about 5 billion years.  If the star is large enough, and our Sun is, when that happens the star just moves on to using other elements to power the fusion process.

The Sun is gigantic both in terms of its size and in terms of its mass.  All that mass is crushed toward the center by gravity.  As a result, the center of the Sun becomes a location subjected to extreme heat and pressure.  The conditions are extreme enough to cause Hydrogen to fuse into Helium at a substantial rate.  That process releases tremendous amounts of energy which, among other things, pushes back against gravity keeping things in balance.

The trick has always been to reproduce those extreme conditions on earth at a much smaller scale and without the need for a star.  For a long time, scientists thought there were three "states" of matter:  solid, liquid, and gas.  Early in the twentieth century a fourth state was discovered, plasma.  At first plasma just appears to be gas.  But it doesn't behave like a normal gas.  That's because the particles of a plasma are electrically charged.

Half of them have a positive charge.  Half of them have a negative charge.  All the positively charged particles repel each other.  All the negatively charged particles repel each other.  That should cause the plasma to immediately fly apart.  It would if it were a normal gas.

But all the positively charged particles are also simultaneously attracted to all the negatively charged particles and vice versa.  That should cause the plasma to smash together, perhaps forming a solid.  But under the right conditions the two effects exactly offset each other and achieve a balance.  When that happens, a plasma is created.

Creating a plasma takes extremely high temperatures.  And various other things must be just right.  But if the right conditions can be created and maintained, then a stable plasma become possible.  Needless to say, a stable plasma is fraught with extremes.  And in this extreme environment high energy collisions are a distinct possibility.  And high energy collisions are just what we need to cause fusion.

It didn't take long for scientists to see plasmas as a possible path to a controlled fusion reaction that could be used to create power.  One thing that helped is the fact that electricity and magnetism are inextricably intertwined.  A moving electric charge creates a magnetic field.  A magnetic field can be used to steer the path of an electrically charged particle.

So, the game became finding just the right set of magnetic and electrical fields to get a plasma to do what we wanted it to do, create conditions that caused Hydrogen to fuse into Helium at a fast enough rate to be useful, but at a slow enough rate so that it didn't just blow everything up.

A lot of designs were tried.  They all failed.  The one that came the closest was a Russian design called a Tokamak.  To the untutored eye the part that contains the plasma looks like a donut.  All kinds of powerful magnets are wrapped around the outside.  The idea is for the plasma to occupy the central area.  This is surrounded by a vacuum.  Particles can then zoom around in a rough circle while never touching the walls.

The positive plasma particles consist of the nuclei of various isotopes of Hydrogen.  The negative plasma particles consist of the electrons that have been stripped from the Hydrogen nuclei.    All of these particles are moving at extremely high speed.  It is hoped that a few of the Hydrogen nuclei will smash into each other and fuse to create Helium nuclei.  The problem of how to collect all of the energy generated by this process and turn it into electric power is being left for a future generation of scientists and engineers to solve.

Over the past few decades, a bunch of Tokamaks have been built.  None of them have worked.  The plasma can only be maintained in a stable configuration at low density for short periods of time.  The amount of fusion, and thus the amount of energy produced, is tiny.

But scientists have seen progress in moving to higher densities and in maintaining the plasma for longer periods of time.  Both kinds of progress contribute to more fusion activity and, therefore, more energy production.  That has led them to believe that they are making steady progress toward a design that works.  One thing that seems to help is size.  They hope that a big enough Tokamak can be made to work.  The end result of this is ITER, the largest Tokamak built so far.

The ITER project being run by the Europeans.  (The U.S. has, so far, made only modest contributions.)  The project has consumed billions of dollars and many years so far.  It will consume billions more before it is completed several years from now.

If, that is, it is ever completed.  (Another delay of two or more years was recently announced.)  And, if it works as well as its backers hope it will, it will not be a practical device.  It will only be a "proof of concept", a device that paves the way for one that actually works.

If going from the ITER to an actual working device sounds like a long shot, it's because it is.  A lot of things have to go well.  And, if they do, it will be at least 20 years, and likely considerably longer, before a Tokamak will be used to fuse Hydrogen into Helium in a generating facility that is feeding commercial quantities of electric power to the grid.  Let's move on to the next longshot.

I am older than the laser.  I remember when the first working one was built.  Back then, it's possible uses seemed limitless.  A few years later when I was in college (roughly 1970) I remember bumping into a guy who was talking about using lasers to zap Hydrogen hard enough to cause it to fuse.

Back then such a trick seemed like it would be relatively easy to pull off.  A laser would be focused onto a tiny spot.  If the laser was powerful enough, and if the spot was small enough, both of which sounded possible, then it should be able to feed enough energy into the Hydrogen to initiate fusion.  And fusing a tiny amount of Hydrogen into Helium would be all that was needed to produce a tremendous amount of energy.

As with creating and maintaining a suitable plasma, the problem turned out to be way harder than anyone expected.  The early experiments were a bust.  But technology kept getting better.  More powerful lasers.  Advances in focusing.  For a while it looked like the goal was within reach.  But it gradually became apparent that it was not.  At least not without access to a giant test facility costing billions of dollars.  And the funding for such a facility was just not there.

Until it was.  To its credit, the ITER was built from the ground up for the expressed purpose of using a plasma to make Hydrogen fuse into Helium.  The giant laser test facility that eventually got built was built to address an entirely different need, a military one.  Whereas it is almost impossible to get billion dollar sized chunks of money approved for civilian projects, the military has long since figured out how to pull that off.  And they have done it multiple times.  They've even done it for projects that are complete boondoggles.

The project, called Nuclear Stockpile Stewardship, was not the first expensive boondoggle the military has sold the White House and Congress on.  Nor will it be the last.  Let me outline the specifics.  The U.S. signed a treaty outlawing the testing of nuclear weapons.  That was a good thing.  But billions of dollars had been flowing annually into the design, construction, and testing of nuclear weapons.  Not surprisingly, defense contractors (and others) wanted all that money to keep flowing.

So, they started talking up the idea that our stockpile of nuclear weapons would fall apart and stop working if nothing was done.  They do need maintenance.  But their actual needs are modest.  But that's not the story the military, defense contractors, and their buddies in congress pushed.  All kinds of extraordinary (and expensive) measures were desperately needed or terrible, just terrible, things would happen to our nuclear stockpile.

So, a project called Nuclear Stockpile Stewardship was added to the Defense budget and billions of dollars started flowing its way every year.  One of the projects funded by this largess was the National Ignition Facility (NIF).  Ginormous lasers would be built and used in clever ways to simulate nuclear explosions.  The facility was situated at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, often facetiously referred to as Los Alamos West.

A vast quantity of money was spent, and the facility was built.  It brought together 192 gigantic lasers, individually among the most powerful lasers ever built.  They could all be focused on a tiny target.  Most "shots" would be used to test various aspects of nuclear weapon development and maintenance.  But it is a unique facility, one that has by far the most powerful (and expensive) set of lasers available anywhere.  They could be used to do laser fusion research, so they occasionally were.

The possibility of using the occasional NIF "shot" to do laser fusion research was lost on no one.  So, pretty much from the start it has periodically been used to run various laser fusion experiments.  One of those tests recently made a big splash in the press.  "Scientific breakeven" had been achieved.  It was big news only because the field has had little positive news to report for many years now.

Mostly, what we have heard about has been yet another instance of a project getting delayed (ITER) or going further over budget (pretty much everything in the field including ITER).  Scientific breakeven was a positive achievement for a change, but a modest one.

The fact that they had to add "scientific" in front of the word "breakeven" kind of gives the game away.  Breakeven is easy to understand in this context.  You put a certain amount of energy in, and you get at least as much, and hopefully a lot more, out.  In this case 2.05 something (it doesn't matter what) units was put in and 3.15 of the same units came out.  They achieved a gain of a little more than 50%.

That's not very impressive, but it beats the alternative. A similar experiment run a year earlier had put 1.8 units of the same something units in and gotten only 1.3 units out.  The process went backwards to the tune of about 30%.  To roughly double the output (going from a gain of about 70% to a gain of about 150%) required several tweaks to the setup and about a year of work to pull off.

To get from "scientific" breakeven to actual breakeven will take a lot, because truly impressive accounting tricks had to be employed in order to allow the word "breakeven" to be used at all.  The facility as a whole is less than 1% efficient.  For every one unit of laser energy that hits the target, more than a hundred units of energy is used just to fire the lasers.

But wait.  It's worse.  No energy conversion system is 100% efficient.  Less than a third of the energy in the gas a car burns ends up being used to move the car down the road.  So only a fraction of the fusion energy will eventually end up as electrical energy.  All told, the laser fusion process needs to be made about a thousand times better in order to put the process into the ranger of practicality.    The current result needs to be doubled, then doubled again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again to get us to where we need to be.

Here's another problem.  If a NIF shot had been able to produce the desired amount of output energy it would have destroyed the chamber containing the Hohlraum.  So, NIF can't even be used to get to true breakeven.   Most likely a whole new facility using different and better technology will need to be built.  Such a facility is likely to cost many billions of dollars.  That's bad but let me give you a tiny bit of good news.

The NIF is not designed and optimized for laser fusion purposes, so it is not very good at it.  In laser fusion mode it is a multi-stage process.  The lasers don't actually hit the ultimate target, a tiny bead of frozen Hydrogen.  The bead is contained within a small complex package called a Hohlraum.   It has a hollow, cylindrical shape.  The ends are partially but not completely closed. But wait.  There's more.

The 192 laser beams enter the Hohlraum through holes in the ends and strike its inner wall.  The inner wall material is chosen to produce copious amounts of X-Rays when struck by the NIF's laser beams.  These strike the bead, which actually consists of several different layers.  The Hydrogen at the center of the bead is compressed and flooded with X-Rays.  Only X-Rays have the energy necessary to initiate the fusion process.  And the NIF lasers are not X-Ray lasers.

It is possible that a facility that was designed from the get-go to do laser fusion would not need so many layers and so much indirection.  That's the good news.  The bad news is that the NIF is a "one shot at a time" facility.  And the turn-around time between shots is measured in days.  To be practical as a wholesale source of electric power, many shots per second will be necessary.  Finally, like the current ITER, NIF includes no means for gathering the energy produced and turning it into electricity.  As a result, multiple generations of new facilities will likely be needed.

The reason all this harkens back to Hydrogen bombs is that's how they work too.  An Atomic bomb is exploded.   Its design has been optimized to cause it to produce copious amounts of X-Rays.  The X-Rays are directed at a reservoir of Hydrogen.  Flood a Hydrogen reservoir with enough X-Rays and fusion ensues.

As with ITER, don't expect anything practical to emerge from laser fusion research in less than twenty years.  As the old saying goes, "fusion is the energy source of the future, and always will be".  I hope fusion power production eventually makes the transition from Science Fiction to reality, but I'm not holding my breath.  Fortunately, there is an atomic energy source of the present.  All we have to do is find the will to take better advantage of it.

Let me start my tour of the current state of nuclear fission as a source of electric power with a recap of the big-three accidents.  The Three Mile Accident happened in 1979.  No one was killed.  The public was never put into danger because the radioactivity that was released was confined to the containment building.

As I noted previously, other than the accident itself, everything worked exactly as it was supposed to.  And over the subsequent years the containment building has been cleaned up and all the highly radioactive components hauled off to "disposal" sites like the Hanford Nuclear Reservation.  A little more about the accident itself.

The design used for the reactor generates Hydrogen gas.  Normally, this is easily and safely vented off.  But the valve that malfunctioned and failed to open was the one that was supposed to vent the gas.  This failure trapped the Hydrogen gas in the reactor vessel.  Hydrogen is light so a bubble formed at the top.  The bubble eventually grew big enough to push the cooling water down to below the top of the Uranium/Zirconium rods.  They overheated and things went south from there.

Three Mile Island sparked a change in instrumentation.  The '50s-style "diagram on the wall" system was supplemented by computer assist.  That should eliminate the possibility of a repeat.  Similar reactors have all been upgraded to include computer assist.  They have operated safely in the decades since.  So, as I noted previously, this was only a financial disaster.

The second of the big-three is Chernobyl.  It happened in 1986.  The atomic "pile" in a squash court at the University of Chicago that played an important role in the development of the original Atomic Bomb was the basis for the design.  The reactor vessel was a large cylinder.  It had a strong floor and was covered by a lid that weighted thousands of tons.  Blocks of a couple of different types of material were stacked inside in a carefully designed pattern.

One type of block used was made of graphite, a kind of carbon, so essentially coal.  When the idiot operators performed their experiment things heated up and some of the graphite blocks caught fire.  Soon there was a giant bonfire going on in the reactor vessel.  At various points the Uranium blocks got rearranged in patterns that caused the chain reaction to speed up.

It is unclear how much was caused by the burning graphite versus the chain-reacting Uranium.  But early on the lid was blown clean off.  This gave the graphite access to lots of oxygen, and it burned furiously.  Eventually, things cooled down, likely after the graphite had all burned off.

But while the fire was going the Venturi effect had thrown large amounts of highly radioactive material into the air.  Large amounts of radioactive material settled on the ground close to the reactor.  Tiny amounts of radioactive material eventually spread as far as Sweeden.  This is not surprising because radioactive material is detectable at extremely low concentrations.  Sweeden and its population were put in no danger by this tiny amount of radioactivity.

A containment structure was hastily built.  It proved to be no match for the weather. Several years later a larger, more elaborate, and more expensive structure was put in place.  It secured the reactor building and all the radioactive material it still contained.  That was most of it.  But far too much radioactive material had drifted away.  The material that had settled in the immediate vicinity had done so in a high enough concentration to be actively dangerous.  The new containment building did nothing to mitigate that danger.

At the time of the accident a large "exclusion zone" was put into place to deal with the areas of high radiation.  Everybody was evacuated.  It is still there.  Its boundaries have changed little since 1986.  There are still no people living there.  But this has let plant and animal life thrive in every part of the exclusion zone.  It turns out that people are more of a threat to plants and animals than even high levels of radioactivity.

I am going to skip over the modern history of Chernobyl other than to note that it is now in Ukraine, an active war zone, and move on to the third big disaster, Fukushima.  It took place in 2011.  There the reactor design was similar to Three Mile Island, but for various reasons it did not include a super-strong Three Mile Island style containment vessel.  And in some ways Fukushima was a repeat of Three Mile Island.

In both cases Hydrogen built up.  In the case of Fukushima things went on long enough for far more Hydrogen to build up.  Eventually, this caused explosions.  Without the super-strong containment vessel, the explosions were strong enough to blow the roof off of reactor buildings.  There was no Hydrogen explosion that large at Three Mile Island.  There the roof remained intact.

The Fukushima facility included several nuclear reactors. The operators of that facility were well aware of the possibility of Hydrogen explosions and what the likely result would be.  The plan covering such a possibility was to vent the Hydrogen off well before it reached dangerous levels.

It's just that the damage caused by the earthquake and Tsunami was so extensive that they couldn't do that.  Had Hydrogen venting been possible, then little or no radioactivity would have spread to the civilian areas that surrounded the facility.

At Three Mile Island the reactor was never successfully SCRAMmed.  If it had been, then nothing bad would have happened.  All the reactors at Fukushima were successfully SCRAMmed.  (This happened after the earthquake hit but before the Tsunami struck the facility.)  But there was no power to circulate cooling water in the days that followed.

Eventually the Hydrogen built up (there was no power to run the valve that controlled venting) and things heated up.  Explosions ensued.  They were insignificant by nuclear standards.  But they were powerful enough to further damage the plant and to throw a considerable amount of radioactive material into the air.

The Japanese immediately implemented a large exclusion zone.  As the people on the receiving end of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki Atomic bombs, the Japanese were hypersensitive to any possible exposure of the general population to heightened levels of radioactivity.  As a result, there were no civilian casualties associated with Fukushima.

It is possible that one or more plant employees were exposed to enough radiation to kill them or damage their health.  But I know of none.  It is safe to say that radiation fatalities associated with Fukushima were likely confined to single digits.  And it is possible that the single digit was zero.

Japan is a capable nation.  But they were hampered by the widespread death and destruction that was caused by the earthquake and tsunami and which had nothing to do with Fukushima.  20,000 people were killed by these twin disasters.  Many billions of dollars' worth of damage was inflicted.  The damage included critical infrastructure like power lines.

All things considered it is remarkable that they were able to get the site under control within only a few months.  But by that time, it was in terrible shape.  For instance, they were forced to resort to flooding some areas of the plant with water.  That was the only way to cool the reactors and keep things under control.

As a result, they ended up with a tremendous amount of contaminated water.  Their short-term solution was to store this water in tanks on site.  But as time has passed, they have literally run out of space.  They are solving this latest problem by resorting to "solution by dilution".

They plan to slowly pour the contaminated water into the ocean.  Various people have objected to this.  But they tend to be the types that believe in the fantasy that there is a zero risk/cost option out there.  But there isn't.  The nay sayers also have no idea just how big the ocean is.

There are 1.3 million tons of contaminated water currently being stored on site.  That sounds like a lot.  But if it is poured into the ocean at the rate of only one cubic meter per second it will take less than three years to dispose of all of it. And ocean water is never completely still.  It is always moving.

 Let's say it is poured into a part of the ocean with a current traveling at a walking pace.  That's three kilometers per hour, not very fast.  But even at that slow rate the radioactive water will travel about 500 KM per week.  After only a week it should have been diluted to a ratio of a billion to one.  The ocean is large.  Much of it is miles deep.  500 KM is only a short distance when it comes to traversing the ocean.

The farther the radioactive water travels, the more dilute it will become.  And that's why I am confident that no harm will come from depositing that amount of radioactive material in the ocean.  Experience with the current methods used to store nuclear waste tell us that something needs to be done, and sooner rather than later.

Back to Chernobyl for a moment.  It is impossible to say how many casualties there were there.  Then as now the Russians are not a reliable source of this kind of information.  Plant personnel were killed.  A small team of experts purposely risked their lives to explore and monitor what was going on inside the building.  That was critical information that could be gotten in no other way.  Some of them died.  Others suffered serious health effects.

Soldiers were brought in during the first few days and deliberately put into extreme danger as part of the effort to get things under control.  It is likely that some of them died, and others suffered serious health effects.  And the evacuation was slow.  So, it is possible that some civilians suffered serious health effects.

The highest estimate I have seen that comes from a credible source puts likely Chernobyl related deaths at a few thousand.  Other estimates are lower.  These estimates include both short term and long-term fatalities.  Of course, many times the number who die will suffer mild to severe health effects.  But even for people who lived in the immediate vicinity of Chernobyl at the time of the disaster, a list of the top 100 health hazards they should be concerned with would not include the disaster. 

All three of these disasters, but particularly Fukushima, had a large impact on society as a whole.  At the time of the Fukushima disaster, Japan had about 80 nuclear power plants.  Japan is resource constrained.  Those nuclear plants allowed Japan to reduce by a large amount the quantity of fossil the fuels they needed to import and consume.  But Japan decided to shutter all its nuclear plants after Fukushima anyhow.

And it wasn't just Japan.  France and Germany, two other countries that had decided for reasons similar to Japan's to depend heavily on nuclear for power generation, announced plans to also drastically reduce or shutter their nuclear power plants.

Soon, the only place where new nuclear power plants were being built was China.  By this time China had terrible air pollution problems.  A major contributor were the many coal-fired electric power plants they had built.  China is still building nuclear power plants.  Unfortunately, they are still building coal plants too.

I was pretty depressed by the general situation when I wrote the posts I linked to above.  Fortunately, things have since changed for the better.  Why?  War and pestilence.  But before moving on, a final observation.  As noted above the Chernobyl design was abandoned as a result of the disaster.  Fukushima highlighted the fact that SCRAMming a reactor of that type was not enough.  It was important that the reactor cooled down completely come hell or high water.

The need for a "passive cooldown" capability was well known.  It's just that before Fukushima the need didn't seem that great and the expected cost, once legal wrangling was factored in, seemed too high.  Fukushima might have driven the industry in the direction of producing new nuclear power plants that included passive cooldown.  Instead, things went in another direction.  They built no new plants and started shutting down the old ones.

Incorporating passive cooldown into the design of a nuclear power plant is simply an engineering problem.  It doesn't matter whether the design is an old one or a new one.  Either way, there are no great technical challenges.  It is simply a matter of deciding to do so.

On the other hand, retrofitting the feature into an already built facility would be fantastically expensive, if it was even possible to do at all.  But for a new plant the design and increase in construction costs are relatively modest.  In spite of this no commercial reactor that incorporated this feature was built.  Why?  The anti-nuclear movement.

A new design, or a significant modification to a current design, automatically triggers a review.  And a review opens the process up to litigation.  The anti-nuclear people are past masters at engineering long, drawn out, and expensive cycles of litigation whenever they get a chance.  The certainty of being tied up in a decade of expensive litigation had to be balanced against the perceived benefit by the industry.

The industry perceived that the benefit was small.  Neither Three Mile Island nor Chernobyl had had any cooldown problems.  In both cases the infrastructure surrounding these plants had remained intact and in good operating condition.  The power necessary to complete the cooldown process had been readily available.  At Fukushima it was a different story.  But remember, Fukushima would not have happened absent a record-breaking earthquake coupled with a record-breaking Tsunami.

Back when I wrote the two posts I referenced above, the situation was tightly locked in.  The anti-nuclear forces were strong and well organized.  The opposition was weak and disorganized.  Under their relentless barrage of attacks nuclear power plant designs were frozen.  Construction ground slowly to a halt everywhere but in China, a country where the government was powerful enough to suppress the anti-nuclear movement.

But things were changing, even if it wasn't apparent at first.  Global Warming started out as a concern limited to certain circles of the scientific community.  Word slowly spread from there.  Then Al Gore hit the lecture circuit with an excellent presentation on the subject.  He turned his presentation into a compelling movie in 2006.  The movie garnered enough buzz to attract the interest of the general public.  They went to see it in droves.

The public interest the movie created soon led to a backlash.  The backlash was initially led by various groups of science deniers.  Then the fossil fuel industry, most notably Exxon Mobile, started secretly funding various disinformation initiatives.  Conservatives started thinking "if liberals like Gore are for it, then we are against it".

But the evidence kept piling up.  The impacts caused by Global Warming kept getting larger and more noticeable.  More and more people were impacted.  Severe weather events got not only more severe but more frequent.  Glaciers, some of which were near built-up areas in Europe and elsewhere, shrank noticeably or even disappeared completely.  There was push back from doubters and deniers.  But it soon became nearly impossible to find a glacier that was growing.

Large population areas began routinely suffering from severe floods, hurricanes, tornadoes, extreme snowfalls, fires, etc.  Bad weather caused power blackouts, massive disruptions to transportation systems, and other activities that added up to far more than just the occasional inconvenience.  "Hundred year" extreme weather events became an annual occurrence.  All the stuff that Gore had warned about started happening.

Eventually, a turning point was reached.  It became nearly impossible to deny that Global Warming was real and that it was having a large negative impact on people.  People still didn't want to do anything because they rightly believed that "the fix" would be uncomfortable, inconvenient, and expensive.

People imagined that "the fix" would a larger and more intrusive version of what happened the two times in the past century when OPEC cut the U.S. off from their oil wells.  People had to suffer through blocks long gas lines.  They were expected to dump their big, cheap, gas guzzler car that was fun to drive for a small, more expensive model that was supposedly more practical, but was also not nearly as fun to drive.  And when things returned to normal, somehow gas was a lot more expensive.

But the Global Warming problem could no longer be ignored.  That led to a search for mitigations that were cheap and pleasant.  Elon Musk came out with an electric car that was cool and fun to drive.  It was too expensive for most people, but it introduced the idea of electric cars as a positive experience rather than a negative one.

Solar Panels and Wind Turbines kept getting cheaper.  They have been the cheapest way to generate electricity for several years now.  They have made it possible to shut down dirty coal fired power plants while saving money.  Switching from getting our electricity from burning fossil fuels to green solutions might actually save money rather than costing it.

That started giving people hope.  Hope that it was possible to fix the problem.  Hope that the problem could be fixed at reasonable cost.  Hope is not the same thing as reality.  But having a reason for hope that is based in reality and not fantasy took away a lot of the negative pressure.

And the cost of doing nothing keeps getting higher and higher.  Floods, Hurricanes, and other weather extremes were literally wiping out people's homes, livelihoods, their whole way of life.  There were real, large, and highly visible costs associated with doing nothing.  That has led to an increase in positive pressure, pressure to do something about the problem.

COVID put everything on hold for a couple of years.  To put it mildly, it was a major disruptor.  After COVID the amount of change people were comfortable with increased tremendously.  COVID was not caused by Global Warming.  COVID didn't even made Global Warming worse or more likely.  But it was a sharp reminder of how interconnected everything is and how change is sometimes forced on us whether we like it or not.

And then Russia invaded Ukraine.  More accurately, they resumed the invasion they had begun in 2014.  It's been a long time since the world has seen a major War.  Ukraine is not a World War, at least not yet.  But it was also not an Iraq or Afghanistan sized war.  In those wars the primary weapons were the AK-47 and the IEDs.

Ukraine is a war involving real armies using state-of-the-art weapons with tremendously greater range and destructive power.  One of them can take out a whole building, not just a few people or a single vehicle.  The amount of havoc being wrought, and the swiftness with which it is being dealt out, have been shocking to many.

And the Ukraine war is not being fought in some less developed corner of the world.  It is being fought in a modern country on the edge of Europe.  And it is a "good guys (Ukraine) versus bad guys (Russia)" type of war.  People often lose track of how often in the postwar period Americans and Europeans have supported some corrupt autocracy against a group of "freedom fighters". 

Whether they actually were or weren't freedom fighters was often unclear.  But they were almost always the indigenous population of the area in dispute.  In the case of the war in Ukraine it is the Ukrainian people who are the indigenous population in the area under dispute.  And they are opposing the Russians, who are indisputably the foreign invaders.

In 2014 the Russians tried to make a case that there was significant support for Russia's actions among the local population in the areas they took control of.  But there was no local faction that had risen up and invited them in.  On the other hand, a lot of people living in the areas Russia occupied in 2014 had strong cultural ties to Russia and saw the Ukranian government of the time as corrupt and suspect.  So, the case the Russians were trying to make at that time was dubious but not completely lacking in merit.

The extent to which the people living in the areas Russia occupied in 2014 still feel positively toward Russia is now an open question.  The Russian occupation makes it impossible to learn the true feelings of those people.  But there is no dispute that when Russia resumed military operations in 2022, they were trying to gain control of areas where they had little or no local support.  It was a land grab, pure and simple.

Wars take place in a geopolitical context.  Europe saw Russia's invasion of Ukraine as a serious threat.  There wasn't much they could do in 2014 due to the precarious nature of the Ukrainian government at the time.  But by 2022 Ukraine had a different government, one that was willing and able to effectively oppose Russia.  This gave the Europeans actual options.  Not everything became possible, but a lot did.  For instance, the Europeans did not want to go to war with Russia.  But they were happy to supply Ukraine with all kinds of assistance, including military assistance.

One of the geopolitical considerations was that in early 2022 when the war started Europe was heavily dependent on Russia for oil and gas.  Theoretically, Russia could close the valve on either or both at any time.  Russia, of course, depended heavily on the money these sales brought in.  So, an important question became "how much damage was Russia willing to inflict on its own economy?"  In any case, it now seemed to be in Europe's interest to move away from Russian oil and gas.

But the whole reason the Europe had gotten into bed with the Russians in the first place was because there were few alternatives to Russia given the amount of fossil fuels that Europe wanted to consume.  As soon as the war started Europe started scrambling to find alternative sources.  That effort has only been partially successful.  That made it obvious that what they really needed to do was to substantially reduce their consumption of fossil fuels.  They needed to go green.

Not that long ago there seemed to be little or no reason to stick with nuclear power plants.  But nuclear plants produce no greenhouse gases.  And they don't depend on what Russia is up to.  As the Ukraine war ground on European countries started shelving their plans for shutting down nuclear power plants.  In fact, it seemed like a good idea to get some of the mothballed plants back online.

A similar thing happened in Japan.  The environmental cost of burning fossil fuels was becoming more apparent.  And Japan was not spared from extreme weather events.  So, the economic case for going green kept getting stronger and stronger.  Plans to mothball Japanese nuclear power plants are now on hold.  Whether they will restart any mothballed units, or build new ones, are still open questions.  But both of options are no longer off the table.

And then there's the U.S.  We are energy independent.  But we don't want to see the Russians succeed in Ukraine.  We have poured tens of billions of dollars into Ukraine's war effort.  We, and the Europeans, have now gone through several cycles of "we can't provide Ukraine with 'X' because it will cross a red line", only to reverse ourselves as the war drags on and start providing 'X'.

At the same time extreme weather events in the U.S. have become routine.  So, here too the anti-nuclear side of the argument is no longer seen as being the zero cost one.  That has drastically changed the calculus that surrounds the construction of nuclear power plants.  It hasn't changed completely yet, but it is moving the U.S. away from an anti-nuclear position.

For instance, for the first time in decades there are two new nuclear power plants under construction.  They are Georgia Power Plant Vogtle unit #3 and unit #4.  Both units are scheduled to come online this year (2023).  One (#3) should be online by the spring.  It only has a couple of hoops left to jump through so that is likely to happen.  The other (#4) has more hoops left to jump through, so it is still several months (and several possible delays) away from coming online.

These plants are the large, multibillion dollar projects we are used to when it comes to nuclear power plant construction.  There have been the usual delays and cost overruns.  Assuming lessons have been learned, similar plants should be cheaper and quicker to build.

But the result will still be large and very expensive projects similar to what we have seen in the past.  They are not game changers, except in the sense that they are actually getting built.  They managed to defeat the anti-nuclear forces in the courts.

A more interesting project is NuScale.  It is the furthest along of several projects that are taking similar approaches.  It has managed to jump through some but not all of the regulatory hoops necessary to actually construct a nuclear power plant.  It is currently scheduled to go online in 2029.  I expect that schedule to slip, possibly substantially.

NuScale is not business as usual in the nuclear power business.    It is one of several efforts to build small modular nuclear plants that differ substantially from the traditional design.  The new designs all aim to have modest siting requirements.  The idea is to eliminate the customization inherent in the current process.  That should save money.  A NuScale power plant would be modular.  As would the others.  A plant would consist of several small, standardized modules that could be produced assembly line fashion.  That too is supposed to save money.

Each effort uses a different, more efficient, process to convert the energy released by nuclear fission into electric power.  Several approaches are being put forward.  All are quite different from the current approach.  All are also supposed to produce less nuclear waste.

If successful, the NuScale approach would be a game changer.  If it fails, then maybe one of the alternatives will succeed.  It will be several years and several billion dollars before we know if NuScale will succeed in delivering on its many promises.  It will be even longer before we know how the others will fare.

But the need for green electric power becomes more urgent every year.  And, for a change, nuclear power is looking better and better every year rather than worse and worse.

UFOs

I have not had much to say on this subject for a long time.  This is partly due to the fact that I haven't posted for a long time.  It is also due to the fact that it has been a while since anything has come out that made it worth the effort necessary to put together a post on the subject.  But the amount of space devoted to the subject in the press in the past year or so has increased substantially.  So, now is a good time to survey the situation.  And, of course, the place to begin is at the beginning.

The ancient Greeks catalogued the heavens.  The found them populated by a large group of "fixed stars" that rotated around the North Pole.  They were called "fixed" because they did not move in relation to each other.  But they did move.  Certain stars rose and set as the night progressed.

And the specific stars that rose and set changed on an annual schedule.  If you were sufficiently versed in the details, you could tell what time of the night it was and what time of the year it was by means of careful celestial observation.  That was handy, but also a mystery.

There was a more dramatic form of change in the sky.  Seven objects moved.  The most obvious was the Sun, which rose and set every day.  The next most obvious was the moon.  Here its behavior was more complicated.  But it was similarly predictable.  Then there were the five "wanderers", Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn.  Their location relative to the fixed stars changed continuously.

The latter three were most peculiar.  They periodically engaged in "retrograde" motion.  Compared to their normal movement with respect to the fixed stars at times they literally changed direction and moved backwards.  So, there were some mysteries for which no satisfactory solution was ever found.  But all these objects moved in regular and predictable patterns.

This led to the belief that whatever was happening in the heavens, it was regular and predictable.  Except, of course this was not the end of the mysteries.  There were even more mysterious objects, objects that were very short lived.  We now call them shooting stars.  They appeared and disappeared in intervals measured in seconds.  There was a little bit of regularity apparent.  The number of shooting stars increased at certain times of the year.  And there was a preferred location in the sky and direction of travel for some of these bursts of activity.

We now know that many shooting stars are debris left over from the disintegration of comets.  The debris hits the upper atmosphere and burns up.  And that brings us to the other category, the longer-lived mysterious objects that we now call comets.  They would show up, brighten, reach a peak, dim, and disappear.  All this took place not over a period of seconds but over a period of months.  Each comet seemed to be unique.  The paths they traced were more likely to be found in certain parts of the sky.  But they otherwise seemed random.

The ancient method of dealing with shooting stars and comets was to mostly ignore them.  So, people got into the habit of thinking of the heavens as this well understood thing that behaved in a very predictable manner.  And it wasn't just the ancient Greeks.  Civilizations from that period, civilizations like the Chinese and the Babylonians, did the same thing.  The details were different.  But when they looked at the sky, they saw order and regularity.

All of these early civilizations saw and catalogued pretty much the same 3,500 objects.  That changed when Galileo became the first of many to point a telescope at the sky.  There were lots more objects up there.  But that discovery did not require a fundamental change in attitude.  The heavens were more complex, but they were still filled with objects that behaved in regular and predictable ways.  Nor did the change from "eyeball" astronomy to photographic astronomy, a change that took place in the early part of the twentieth century, change things.  Everything was still assumed to be regular and predictable.

And, except for the heavenly creatures posited by many religions, it was presumed to be lifeless.   But adventure fiction, most notably that of Jules Verne, and later what came to be called Science Fiction, most notably at the hands of H. G. Wells, introduced people to the idea that space aliens of one kind or another might populate the heavens.

This spilled over into the realm of science when Percival Lowell, a noted and well-respected astronomer, announced that he had seen "canals" on Mars.  He used the "mark one eyeball" to make the observations this announcement was based on.  But he made his announcement just as the photographic plate was starting to replace the eyeball as the preferred method for astronomers to observe the heavens.

His announcement was immediately controversial within the astronomical community.  Other did not see what he was seeing.  At that time these kinds of disagreements were common.  Different astronomers often reported seeing different things when observing the same celestial object.  The fact that these disagreements were so common was one of the two main reasons why astronomers switched over to using photographic plates instead of relying on direct observation.

Switching over allowed multiple astronomers to examine the same photographic plate.  There were few disagreements about what a specific plate showed or did not show.  Astronomers looked at lots of plates showing Mars and could find no evidence of canals.  This lack of photographic evidence for Martian canals caused most astronomers to conclude that Lowell had gotten it wrong.

The second advantage is that photographic plates can be exposed for long periods of time.  An eyeball gathers light for less than a second before turning it into a picture.  A photographic plate can be exposed for many minutes.  This allows objects that are too faint to be made out by direct observation to register on a photographic plate in an unambiguous way.

Neither of these changes made a fundamental difference to astronomer's belief about the question under discussion.  They had long since decided that there were no creatures, celestial or otherwise, occupying the heavens.  The "canals of Mars" controversy came and went relatively quickly.  In the end it served to cement the idea that the heavens were void of life.

At least it did among professional astronomers and other scientists.  The beliefs held by general public were another story.  Verne and Wells were very popular.  They were not alone.  Edgar Rice Burroughs, the creator of the spectacularly popular character "Tarzan the Ape Man" also created a second character that for a long time was almost as popular, John Carter.  He starred in a number of popular books that chronicled his adventures on Mars.  Mars, in Burroughs' conception, was populated, not by a single race of aliens, but by several.

By the 1920s adventure stories featuring the likes of Carter became popular enough that they were spun off into a new category:  Science Fiction.  The stories were populated by brawny men, gorgeous women, and space aliens of all types.  Most but not all of the aliens were evil.  Most but not all of the aliens lusted after human women.

Sure, it was fiction.  But it firmly planted into the consciousness of a large segment of the public the idea that intelligent life that was not human and that did not originate on earth was possible.  Lots of people looked down on the purveyors and the consumers of Science Fiction.  But that didn't mean that they rejected out of hand the possibility that space aliens actually existed.

Then in 1947 a spectacular story started making the rounds in the press.  An airplane pilot, presumably a reliable observer, saw what came to be called "flying saucers".  The pilot never used that phase.  But after his initial report had passed through several hands, that's what the press decided to label what his report described.

We now know exactly what the pilot saw.  It was something called a "lenticular cloud".  ("Lenticular" is a fancy word for saucer shaped.)  Lenticular clouds are an uncommon phenomenon.  At the time most meteorologists had never heard of them.  That's because it takes an unusual set of circumstances to produce one.

You need a tall mountain.  In this case, the mountain was Mount Rainier, one of the tallest mountains in North America.  Then you need specific weather conditions.  With the right mountain and the right weather conditions air flowing over the mountain causes water vapor to condense at a certain place and form a cloud.  As the air travels a little further, atmospheric conditions change enough for the water to evaporate back into clear gas.  This restricts the extent of the cloud.  In short, we get a small lenticular cloud located in a specific place relative to the mountain.

This particular pilot had never seen the like.  Since most meteorologists had never seen the like, the pilot can't really be blamed for being surprised and confused by what he saw.  Nevertheless, it made for a good mystery.  And mysteries sell papers, so it got widespread coverage.

What was actually going on was quickly determined.  But the explanation was a bunch of boring technical mumbo-jumbo.  So, it got little coverage.  Many people knew of the mystery.  Few people knew that the mystery had been solved.  That's all it took to set off the whole UFO craze.

Interest in UFOs waxes and wanes, but it never quite goes away.  People want to believe in their existence.  So, they accept skimpy evidence.  And the field is ripe with charlatans.  The manufacture of phony pictures and films started almost immediately.  Why?  Because there are several tried and true ways to monetize a supposed sighting.

Alien abduction stories, especially those involving "anal probes" and other sensational nonsense, began to appear regularly.  The people at the center of these stories were a mix of honest but credulous people and outright fraudsters.

Much but not all of this was eventually debunked.  As with the original UFO story, many more people heard the story than heard the explanation.  And many people who heard the explanation chose not to believe it.  This left a large residue of the unexplained for true believers to cling to.

But unexplainable events are an ordinary part of life.  And most of the unexplainable UFO events fall into the category of "bright object in the sky doing something weird".  In most cases it is literally impossible to gather additional information after the fact.  So many of these events linger without any confirmation of refutation.  Believers point to the sheer number of these events as proof of something.  It is not.

Over the last couple of years, the UFO story has received a new injection of fuel.  A Freedom of Information request forced the Federal Government to release a bunch of "UFO" files.  The release was bracketed by bunch of nonsense about a massive government coverup and various secret government projects.  But we've been here before and this nonsense is par for the course.

So, is there anything new in all of this?  No!  Sure, there are new reports.  But they differ in no significant way from the old reports.  There are just more of them.  But that's because there is more opportunity for something puzzling to happen.  So, the increase in frequency is not surprising.

The only truly noteworthy development is that the government has finally caved.  It has now established a small permanent group charged with collecting and tracking reports of this sort of thing.  The group is accepting reports from both inside the government, primarily from the military, and from the outside.  Anyone who wants to report something can now do so.

Instead of getting swept up in all this manufactured frenzy it is important to step back and take a look at the big picture.  A 1977 movie popularized a good UFO categorization scheme.  The movie was called Close Encounters of the Third Kind.  So, what are the three kinds of "close encounters"?

A close encounter of the first kind is a reported sighting, perhaps backed up by pictures or videos.  In other words, what we have been putting up with since 1947.  A close encounter of the second kind is the collection of actual physical evidence.  I want to go into that in some detail.

Imagine you are magically transported a hundred years back in time.  That is not a long time.  Civilization has been around for thousands of years.  The earth has been around for billions of years.  Life on earth has been around for most of those billions of years.

What would people whose lives are not that different from ours make of a smart phone?  Phones were a common part of daily life back then.  Many smart phone functions would not work (no cell or web signal), but some would.  The phone itself, however, would appear to have been created out of alien technology.  As a single example among dozens, the glass the screen is made of had not been invented a hundred years ago.  The reaction to your smart watch, should you be wearing one, would be similar.

But wait. There's more.  How about the fob many of us now use instead of car keys?  Cars were another common part of life back then.  But keys were used to unlock and start them.  The proximity sensor built into the fob, however, would look like magic.  Or how about something completely mundane like cash?

Credit cards would be a mystery.  But money in the form of bills and coins, that was something people of the period were intimately familiar with.  But the way coins are now made has gotten a high-tech upgrade.  A modern quarter looks superficially like the quarter of a century ago.  But a modern quarter could not have been made a hundred years ago.

And what about the anti-counterfeiting innovations now found in currency?  The holographic number.  The "security band".  More alien magic.  The technology to study these monetary innovations existed back then.  But the technology necessary to create them would reek of alien technology to an expert of that period.

What's my point?  My point is that any truly alien artifact has a strong likelihood of being obviously alien.  An actual alien object would be unlikely to consist entirely of materials that are capable of being manufactured in quantities and at low enough cost to be incorporated into common consumer products.  In short, it would almost inevitably contain one or more components like the glass used in smartphone screens.  It is also likely that, like the modern quarter, it was manufactured or assembled in a manner beyond our current technical ability.  In short it would be obviously and unambiguously alien.

A close encounter of the third kind is a face-to-face meetup with an alien.  Again, the alien is likely to be obviously and unambiguously alien.  The movie I cited ends with a spectacular and very cinematic close encounter of the third kind, a face-to-face encounter between humans and aliens.  An actual encounter with an actual space alien is likely to be much more alien than the event shown in the movie.

Close Encounters of the Third Kind came out in 1977.  By then the UFO phenomenon had been around for decades and had received lots of publicity.  And the movie did and does a good job of laying out the appropriate benchmark for judging where we are at.  And where we are at is precisely where we were at in 1977.

Then and now we have lots and lots of examples of close encounters of the first kind.  And then and now those examples are crappy.  Grainy pictures and videos.  Unsupported eyewitness reports.  No physical evidence available for examination by actual experts.  Given the ubiquity of smartphones containing high quality cameras, why is there not even high-quality visual evidence of a close encounter of the first kind?

We are soon presented with good quality stills and/or video every time some tragedy or other event of note occurs.  Many of these events are unusual, uncommon, or both.  Cameras are literally everywhere these days.  Yet they are somehow never present when a flying saucer zips by, or a space alien waves at someone.  The quality of the evidence for close encounters of the first kind never seems to get any better.

And we still have no examples of close encounters of the second kind, let alone a close encounter of the third kind.  The capabilities of the technology necessary for investigating and documenting close encounters of the second or third kind has grown by leaps and bounds.  Crime labs can work miracles with skin cells, hair fibers, and other kinds of trace evidence, even if it is found in miniscule quantities.  Yet not the tiniest sample of an alien artifact, or the alien itself, has ever turned up.

The great scientist and philosopher Richard Feinman made an important observation that bears on this issue.  When something is first observed it is often fuzzy.  What's going is often unclear because we start out having little observational data, and what we do have may be of poor quality.  The proper thing to do is to try to improve the quality and quantity of the data.

If that is done then one of two things will happen, Feinman observed.  Things will come into focus.  There is something going on there and these are its characteristics.  Or it will not.  Often subsequent observation with better equipment results in the hypothesized phenomenon going away completely as the canals of Mars did.

If subsequent observations using better equipment and procedures do not cause something to come into focus, then it is likely that there was never anything there in the first place.  Seventy-five years of UFO observations indicates that it is likely that there is nothing there.

The universe is a big place.  There may well be intelligent life out there in the form of space aliens.  But they are likely to be a long way away.  So far away that unless someone finds a way around the limitation imposed by the speed of light, then it is impractical, perhaps impossible, for them to visit us.

And that makes it unlikely that in the last seventy-five years space aliens have buzzed military aircraft, civilian aircraft, or anything else.  It is also unlikely that they have abducted and returned people in order to perform unnatural medical experiments on them.  They are also unlikely to have been lurking in woods or swamps or anywhere else shining the occasional light at us.  They certainly have made no crop circles, a hoax that was debunked years ago.

It is possible that space aliens visited earth thousands, or millions, or billions of years ago.  Short of leaving some space garbage behind in a protected cave, evidence of their visit could easily have been erased in the interim by natural processes.  But absent high quality evidence, which would count as a close encounter of the second kind, even that is unlikely.

I like a good science fiction book or movie.  I am perfectly happy if it is jammed to the rafters with space aliens.  But it is not real.  The presence of space aliens is just another fantasy element.  Fantasy elements do not stop me from enjoying something as a fun piece of entertainment.  But I am never confused about where entertainment ends and where reality begins.

I am also fine with people who become deeply invested in Star Trek or Star Wars.  They are no different than the people who become deeply invested in Lord of the Rings, or Manga, more obvious examples of fantasy.  As long as they know where fantasy ends and where reality begins, then I salute them for their energy and creativity.  But as to the people who believe that UFOs are real based on the crappy evidence that is all that has been produced since 1947, a period lasting the better part of a century?  Those are people that I have a beef with.

Iran and the Bomb

 Iran has had nuclear ambitions for a while now.  Specifically, they have expended a lot of blood, sweat, and tears in an effort to get into a position where they could build an atomic bomb.  They claim that they don't want to build a bomb.  They just want to ramp up their capabilities in the area.  Others say, "they want to build a bomb".

We won't know who is correct until they either abandon their current efforts or succeed in building a bomb.  But does it really matter if they build a bomb?  There is a widespread belief that the answer as a resounding "yes".  That is a belief I subscribed to for a longtime.  But recent events have caused me to revise my thinking.

Conventional analysis says that the Iranians are bad people, they are a "rogue state" capable of much mischief.  Topping the list of what mischief Iran might get up to is that they might nuke somebody.  Israel thinks that they are the most likely target, so they are adamantly opposed to Iran getting the bomb.

A less extreme concern is that of "the domino theory of proliferation".  If Iran gets the bomb, then its neighbors will be forced to "keep up with the Jonses" and launch bomb building programs of their own.  So, who are Iran's neighbors?  It turns out that Iran has a lot of neighbors.

One of them is Pakistan.  But Pakistan already has the bomb.  Then there's Afghanistan.  It is too poor, both financially and intellectually to build a bomb.  The same is true of Turkmenistan, Azerbaijan and Armenia.  There are some gulf states, but I think we can discount them too.

That leaves the big three, Turkey, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia.  Any one of them might decide to start a bomb building program.  But they might do that regardless of what Iran does.  All have aspirations to be seen as major powers.  Nothing says "major power" like "we have the bomb", or so conventional wisdom would have it.

Underneath all this is something more basic and fundamental.  The world has been living with the existence of nuclear weapons for more than seventy-five years.  One way it has done this is by dividing nuclear powers into two groups, the responsible countries and the irresponsible ones.  The danger, we are told, stems from the irresponsible ones.

The list of responsible powers starts with the U.S., Britain, and France.  At least the list that is created by Americans and Europeans does.  To this are normally added Russia and China.  And the same cabal that assumes that the U.S., Britain, and France are responsible powers assumes that Iran would be an irresponsible one.  But this whole responsible/irresponsible dichotomy quickly breaks down.

The first atomic bomb was created by a joint effort between the U.S. and Britain.  The U.S. is the only country that has used an atomic bomb as an instrument of war.  We dropped two of them on Japan at the end of World War II.

The initial plan was to keep the nuclear club at two members.  But Russia, then the U.S.S.R., using a combination of smarts, spying, and a herculean effort, initially succeeded in building one bomb.  Later they built lots of bombs, far more than they could conceivably need.

This was the first instance of nuclear proliferation.  It would be far from the last one.  As a favor to France, a wartime ally who suffered grievously, France was let into the club.  Perhaps in an effort at balance, Russia helped China to get the bomb.

At this point the club had five members, all substantial powers at the time they got the bomb.  But proliferation continued.  Israel is not officially a member of the club.  But the story goes that at some point the U.S. decided to help them out.

So, although they are not officially a member of the nuclear club, pretty much everyone believes that they have a small number of bombs.  Of course, this all speculation.  Israel has never admitted they have the bomb.  And they have never tested one.

Then there's China.  They decided to actively support proliferation.  In particular, they helped Pakistan get the bomb.  India got the bomb a decade after China did and over two decades before Pakistan did.  And the newest member of the nuclear club is North Korea.

The responsible/irresponsible division perhaps made some sense a few decades ago.  But there is a case to be made that it never really did.  And relatively recent events call it even further into question.  The first one is the addition of North Korea to the list of nuclear powers in 2006.  North Korea is not by any stretch of imagination a responsible country.  But it is a nuclear power and life goes on.

And there has been no rush by other countries to join the nuclear club as a result of North Korea's admission.  South Korea would be the obvious candidate.  They are an economically and technologically advanced country.  If they wanted to, I have no doubt they could join the club.  But they have chosen not to make the attempt.

Then there is the second member to join the club, Russia.  Earlier this year Russia invaded Ukraine.  Things have not been going well.  That has caused Putin, Russia's leader, to make all kinds of dire threats of a nuclear nature.  These threats are completely irresponsible.

So, the question needs to be asked.  Would Iran behave more irresponsibly than Russia or North Korea?  I don't think so.  Culturally, Iran is Persian.  That makes them one of the oldest civilizations on the planet.  They know in their bones what proper governance looks like.  That doesn't stop them from doing reprehensible things.

But then all countries that have the capability do reprehensible things.  We invaded Iraq.  The justification for the invasion turned out to be completely false.  So, there are no countries who are without sin.

Is Iran somehow more sinful than other countries in the region or the world?  Not that long ago Iraq invaded Iran.  Turkey under Erdogan has not shown itself to be a bastion of probity.  I could go on.

A key question to ask is "will a nuclear Iran behave differently and worse than an Iran without the bomb?"  Bluntly, will Iran behave more badly than North Korea or Russia?  I tend to think not.  After all, the behavior necessary to pass that test would have to be pretty extreme.

So, given that, is it worth the effort to continue to try to block Iran from getting the capability to build an atomic bomb?  I don't think so.  This is especially true because successfully blocking Iran from continuing their nuclear program depends critically on Russia cooperating.

And that leads to another question:  If we stopped trying to block their nuclear aspirations could Iran be turned into a partner who is more reliable and helpful than some of our current partners and allies in the region?

This is one of those "low bar" questions.  Nominally, Turkey and Saudi Arabia are our partners and allies.  But neither is a bastion of virtue.  If we reversed our position and told Iran, "go for it" when it comes to their nuclear program then many things immediately become possible.

We currently have an oil shortage due to Russian bad behavior.  Iran has stated that, if encouraged, they could ramp oil production up substantially.   Turkey is making mischief.  They are talking about blocking the admission of Sweden and Finland into NATO.  They were less than completely helpful in dealing with Syria, under Assad a very irresponsible country.

Turkey has great power aspirations.  In other words, they want to throw their weight around in order to get what they want.  Iran can counterbalance that.

Another country that likes to throw its weight around, and not in a good way, is Saudi Arabia.  To say that they have a repressive society that is deeply corrupt and has a terrible human rights record is to understate the situation.  Again, Iran can function as a counterbalance.

Would Iran be a better partner on the world stage than Russians has turned out to be?  They would be hard pressed to do worse.

So, my suggestion is to rethink our whole strategy of opposing Iran's nuclear program.  Getting into the nuclear club just isn't as rewarding as it used to be.  Trading away what are now very damaged goods in exchange for much more useful benefits in other areas sounds like a more productive course to embark on to me.

Inflation and the Fed

We are now going through a period of high inflation.  Until a few months ago the only thing a lot of people remembered experiencing was low inflation.  Now that inflation has spiked up everyone is tearing their hair out and spouting the economics equivalent of "we are all going to die".  We are not all going to die.

What has thrown people's expectations off is the extended period of low inflation that, up until recently, we have all been living through.  Many think that what we are now experiencing (high inflation) is unprecedented.  And, therefore, there is nothing that can be done.  It is going to continue on forever.  But this is a situation where history can be a very accurate guide.  We have been here before.

And there is a second factor.  That's the current position the Fed finds itself in.  (Queue the segue into historical mode.)  I have been following the general state of the U.S. economy for decades.  I am familiar with the Fed.  I know what it is about.  I have investigated how it works (or doesn't) across a period spanning an even longer period.  Let's start with the pre-Fed era.

In the 1800s, and especially in the late 1800s, the U.S. went through a series of "panics".  That's what they were called, and for good reason.  The way banks work is that they take deposits.  They then put most of the money back out in the form of loans.  The interest and fees the loan portfolio generates allows the bank to make a profit, and perhaps pay a little something back to the depositors for the use of their money.

But every once-in-a-while a rumor would start circulating that a particular bank was in trouble.  Sometimes it was true.  Sometimes it was not.  But once a significant number of people believed that the rumor was true, or even only believed that it only might be true, they moved immediately to pull all of their money out of the bank.  This was perfectly sensible.  If the bank went under, they stood to lose all or most of any money still held by the bank.

This behavior was called a "bank run".  If too many people withdrew their money, then the bank got into trouble.  They had enough money around, assuming they were sound, to cover the normal in and out of daily business.  But they didn't have enough money to pay off a significant percentage of the funds on deposit.  It was out in the form of loans.  As a result, few banks survived a run.

And this turned into a self-fulfilling prophecy as more and more people learned how bank runs worked.  And that meant more rumors.  And that meant more bank runs.  And that meant more bank failures.  If a number of banks got into trouble people panicked and started pulling money out of all banks.  By late in the century panics, periods when there were runs on a lot of banks at the same time, happened once every five to ten years.

This was very destructive to the economy.  Banks failed.  Business was disrupted.  Individuals and companies lost lots of money.  Pressure built to do something about it.  The result was the establishment of the Federal Reserve, or "Fed" for short, in 1914.  It was supposed to regulate banks.  That was supposed to reassure depositors and put an end to panics.

It wasn't enough.  Until the FDIC, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, was created in response to the start of the Great Depression, panics continued.  The FDIC insured banks that the Fed blessed.  It had enough money to pay depositors in the event of a run.  So sound banks stopped going under and we stopped having financial panics.

But remember, the Fed's job is to be a regulator.  Besides making sure that banks are sound they are responsible for the general state of the economy.  They are supposed to manage the banking system so that the economy grows steadily, unemployment remains low, and inflation does not get out of control.

For a long time, the Fed was able to do a good job.  Banks were sound because the Fed forced them to be conservatively run.  Essentially from the end of World War II the Fed was able to keep the economy growing, the unemployment rate relatively low, and inflation under control.  I can put numbers to these goals.

The magic number for economic growth was 3.8%.  For a long time, if the economy grew at or above a 3.8% rate the incumbent political party retained control at the Federal level.  If it fell below 3.8%, we saw a change in which party was in control.  The target for unemployment was 3-5%.   It was believed that it was impossible to go below 3%.  But anything under 5% was considered good.

The target for inflation was 2%.  Why not 0%?  It turns out that it is hard for businesses to lower prices in a healthy economy.  The reasons are complex, and I am not going to get into them.  But if the general rate of increase in prices is 2% then some companies will not be able to raise prices that fast.  Relative to the rest of the economy, their prices will deflate without the necessity of them actually cutting prices.  So, an inflation rate of 2% was considered the Goldilocks spot.

The Fed missed one or more of these targets regularly.  But they were generally able to steer the economy back into the sweet spot.  But the Fed was a victim of its own success.  After a few decades of things working great for everybody, people (the banks and big business) decided that keeping things locked down so tight was not justified.  So, a push, led primarily by Republicans, gathered steam to "deregulate".

A Democrat, President Carter, was the first to actually start deregulating things.  He didn't deregulate banks.  That came later.  But the deregulation bandwagon gained so much momentum that it ground on for more than a half century.  So, after a period of both incredible economic growth and economic stability, we have gone back to the bad old panic days.

We had the Savings and Loan scandal of the '90s.  (Don't ask - everybody has forgotten about it by now.)  We had the "Dot Com Bomb" of the early 2000's.  We had the Wall Street meltdown just before 2010.  And now we have the economic disruption attributed to COVID.  The latest sub-phase is the inflation spike that has been all over the news for the last few months.

Truth be told, it was more than deregulation that has been a problem for the Fed.  Historically, the main tool the Fed has used was its ability to manipulate interest rates.  If the Fed forced raised interest rates, then business would pull back.  They would borrow less.  That left them with less money with which to grow.  Or so the theory went.  This pullback would cause the economy to shrink.  This caused inflation to decline, but economic growth was hurt, and unemployment went up.  This was all to the good if the economy was "overheated".

On the other hand, a lowering of interest rates would cause business to borrow more.  That's the theory, anyhow.  Businesses would use the increased borrowing to grow and expand.  That made economy as a whole grow more quickly.  Unemployment would go down, but inflation would go up.  This is all to the good if the economy is underperforming, if it is "stalled".  And practice matched theory for a long time.

The interest rate tool is often equated to the rudder on a supertanker.  A slow turn will result in a large change in direction, if it is allowed to go on for long enough.  That is good enough, so supertankers are notorious for having small rudders in comparison to their total size.  A small rudder is no problem if it gets the job done.

But what if a supertanker encounters a big storm?  The wind can push the supertanker around.  After all, it has these giant flat sides.  Similarly, a supertanker is big.  That means that small waves don't affect it much.  But big waves, waves generated by a large storm, do.  Supertankers are careful to stay away from storms because of this.

The economy can also be subjected to large and powerful storm-like events.  And, if that's what is happening, then the small interest rate "rudder" the Fed uses to put the economy back on course, gets overwhelmed.  That's what happened in the Wall Street meltdown.  By itself, the interest rate rudder was too small to get the economy back on course.

And then there's the trade-off.  The economy is supposed to have either high growth and high inflation or low growth and low inflation.  That allows the Fed to play growth off against inflation to move the economy in the right direction to get it back on track.

But the economic theory that predicted that it was impossible to have slow growth and high inflation at the same time proved to be wrong.  It happened late in the Nixon/Ford administration.  President Carter got growth going, but at the cost of super-high inflation.  President Reagan got inflation back under control by forcing a short recession.  After that, the standard trade-off was back on.

But the side effect of the Reagan move was to permanently depress economic growth.  We have had periods of high employment since.  We have had periods of low employment since.  But we haven't had a period of sustained high growth since.  Experts are now satisfied with a growth rate in the 1-2% range.  This is fine for Wall Street.  They have figured out how to make money in a low growth environment.  But it has been bad for main street and for workers.

So, we have been living in this low growth, low inflation regime for a long time.  It looks a lot like stagflation.  But, since the stock market has been doing great, the poor state of the underlying economy, and the poor state of household wealth and income (if you exclude the top 1%), gets consistently ignored.

But then things changed drastically a few months ago.  The Biden Administration has put a lot of money into the pockets of ordinary Americans.  For a while, COVID made it hard for them to spend it.  But the response to COVID has evolved and it became easier and easier for people to spend, spend, spend.  And they did.

And they spent on goods, not services.  Early in the pandemic they spent on services like Netflix.  But by the second half of 2021 they were spending heavily on goods like Pelotons.  The problem was that the economy was totally unprepared.

The Reagan Administration made it easier for companies to offshore manufacturing jobs, initially to China, but later to all over.  The U.S. economy gradually transitioned from being manufacturing based to being service based.  We no longer make much in the U.S.A.  Instead, we import it.

And COVID screwed that up.  Manufacturing was disrupted by the Chinese "zero tolerance" approach to COVID.  Shipping was disrupted due to a shortage of longshoremen at the ports and truckers further inland.

The first introduction to this for most of the public was the lack of facemasks.  When demand skyrocketed it turned out that the only real mass producer was China.  And initially China needed all the masks it could make for domestic use.

Since, then we have been introduced to a variant of the mask story in commodity after commodity after commodity.  And it turned out that the U.S. had little or no capability to manufacture masks, or pretty much anything else, domestically.

It is important to understand that the underlying cause of a lot of these problems was a side effect of demand rising sharply.  Demand for masks certainly soared almost overnight.  Demand for other goods didn't rise as dramatically as the demand for masks did.  But demand went up pretty dramatically for many goods at the same time.

In recent years the world economy had gotten used to producing a certain amount of goods.  It has also gotten used to the demand for goods growing only slowly.  That's a side effect of the slow-growth regime that we have all gotten used to.  When an across-the-board spike in demand for goods of all kinds hit, the world system for production and distribution got overwhelmed.

So, we saw bottlenecks everywhere.  They happened at the manufacturing level.  They happened at the shipping level.  They happened at the warehousing and retailing level.  Volumes in all these areas shot up and none of them were prepared to handle the increase.  Chaos ensued.

The size and breadth of the increase in economic activity is best demonstrated by the fact that in 2021 U.S. GDP shot up by 5.7%.  Remember, the old "good" number was 3.8%.  It turns out that you have to go back to the Reagan Presidency to find a year in which U.S. GDP grew by a comparable amount.  And, with the notable exception of China, GDP went up substantially pretty much everywhere.  It was not just a U.S. phenomenon.

The obvious and expected side effect of this is inflation.  If there is a shortage of goods, and people will continue buying them even after the price goes up, then prices are bound to go up.  But it is important to note that this is happening in a surprising environment.  Unemployment is way down.  And wages are up.  Owners are finding it hard to hire and retain employees even after raising wages by historically large amounts.

The law of supply and demand predicts that, if an employer raises wages, more people will apply for a job.  But that hasn't happened.  It has particularly not happened in traditionally low wage sectors of the economy like hospitality and retailing.  This difficulty in filling jobs is one of several contributors to the widespread "we are all going to die" sentiment.

I am now going to focus on the Fed.  It is part of the Fed's remit to worry about this sort of thing.  And they do.  If we go back a few years, there was this long period of time where the general consensus was that the Fed was not up to the task.  It was the whole "rudder on the supertanker" problem.  The Fed saw the economy getting deeper and deeper into trouble.

The Fed needed to apply stimulus.  So, they did.  The kept lowering and lowering and lowering interest rates, trying to get the economy to improve.  It didn't, at least not by enough.  Eventually the Fed lowered interest rates all the way to zero.  If that doesn't work, what's the next move?

Some central banks (the term applies to the Fed equivalents in other countries) managed to find a way to drive interest rates negative.  That was supposed to be impossible, but they found a way.  But even negative interest rates didn't work.

This all happened during the Wall Street meltdown.  By itself, right full rudder was not enough to turn the supertanker.  The Fed, staring into the economic abyss and aware of its own history, decided to do more.  Specifically, they turned to what became known as "extraordinary measures".  One measure went by the name "quantitative easing".  Mostly what they did, however, was to buy lots of investment securities.  Eventually that worked and the hemorrhaging stopped.  And the economy began to slowly recover.

After it became apparent that the economy was on the mend, the Fed stopped all the extraordinary measures except its program of purchasing investment securities.  That it continued, but at a reduced rate.  Many, but not all experts argue that one reason the recovery was so slow was because the Fed dialed back prematurely.  In their defense, they never completely stopped, and opinions on the matter differ.  After a few years they also moved interest rates up slightly.

They went back to zero interest rates and increased the amount of investment securities they were purchasing at the insistence of President Trump.  Both of these steps were highly stimulative.  The changes forced by Trump were, in my opinion, unnecessary.  But he wanted the economy to do as well as possible on the theory that it would help with his reelection.  He did not care whether or not it was the right policy for the economy.

The point of all this is to make it crystal clear that the Fed is currently stimulating the hell out of the economy.  They have effectively had the interest rate rudder jammed all the way over to the right for many years now.  That means that, if they shift the rudder to the left by forcing interest rates up, they have a rudder that is effectively twice as big as it ordinarily would be.

But wait.  There's more.  They are also still buying lots of investment securities every month.  That also stimulates the hell out of the economy.  In the years immediately after the Wall Street meltdown they had the "stimulate the economy" knob turned way up.  They have since dialed it back down some.  Then Trump made them dial it back up.  It is not dialed as high as it was in the early days.  Still, it is still dialed high enough to produce a strong stimulative effect.

If we return to our supertanker analogy, think of the securities purchase program as a second rudder, a really big one.  For a while it too was jammed far to the right.  Then it was moved more toward the center.  Then it was moved right, but not so much that it is now jammed all the way over.

The result of all this is that the Fed is in a great position to get inflation under control.  They can do the usual "move the rudder left " thing by increasing interest rates.  FYI, a typical range for 10-year government bonds is 3-5%.  Today, the rate is 1.8%, and that's up considerably from where it was a couple of months ago.

Historically, a normal range for mortgages would be in the 4-6% range.  But it has been a long time since people expected to pay 5% for a mortgage.  For contrast, I paid 8.5% in the '80s for my mortgage.

Moving interest rates to the range that used to be considered normal would take some steam out of the economy.  The Fed has recently signaled that it intends to do so.  That was enough to drive the "big three" (the Dow Jones Industrial Average, the S&P 500, and the NASDAQ) stock indexes down sharply.  (They have all recovered somewhat in the past few days.)

But that's not even the modern Fed's big gun.  The Fed now has what is described as an "inflated balance sheet".  The Fed literally owns a lot of investment securities.  And, as part of its extraordinary measures it has been buying more because that's what Trump pressured it to do.

At a minimum it could shut down its program for buying securities.  The current plan is for it to "taper", to lower the total amount of securities it purchases each month.  Eventually the amount would get to zero.  That would move the effect of the extraordinary measures to neutral.

The Fed can go even further, if it decides it needs to.  It can raise interest rates to a level that is above historic norms.  It could also begin selling off its large portfolio of investment securities.  It has complete control over how fast it sells them.  It can go with whatever rate is necessary to get the economy back to where it needs to be. 

So, the Fed is in a position to exert however much pressure is necessary in order to bring inflation down.  But that's not all.  COVID is still gumming up the works.  But it may be that Omicron will be the last wave.  And Omicron is likely to decline nearly as fast as it increased.  The economy may soon no longer have COVID holding it back.

Doing almost anything is hard now, due to COVID.  The movie and TV production business has responded to the threat COVID represents by saddling itself with a long list of safety protocols.  They slow things down and make it harder and more expensive to do a show.  We see this play out in the way new content is currently being released in dribs and drabs.

If COVID is in our rear-view mirror, TV and movie production can ramp back up to where it was in the before times.  It could even expand.  And the same is true, usually to a lesser extent, in industry after industry.

For instance, it will be easier to unsnarl shipping delays by adding capacity when COVID is no longer an issue.  And then there is the hospitality business.  Cruise ships are a mess.  The COVID inspired rules and regulations add to costs and diminish the cruising experience.

In spite of all the new rules and procedures there have been multiple instances of large COVID outbreaks on ships.  Adding to their problems is the fact that this has got to be keeping some cruisers away.  That's bad for business.  It also gets in the way of efforts to increase business.

Cruise ships are run by large companies.  Their size gives them access to a lot of resources.  Consider the plight of a small business like a restaurant.  They don't have the same access.  But that doesn't stop them from having the same kinds of problems.  People have to be staying away because of COVID concerns.

Unfortunately, so have the people who work at restaurants.  Restaurants have been having awful problems getting and retaining staff.  This is true even after wages have been raised substantially.  No doubt, some people don't want to take the risk.  But also consider the hassle.

When it comes to dealing with COVID, restaurants have a number of approaches to choose from.  But the only one that is totally hassle free is choosing to close.  If they decide to stay open instead, no matter what approach they decide on, some group or another is going to be mad at them.

That anger translates into more unruly patrons, and patrons who, when the get out of line, get much further out of line than they used to.  Who wants to work a dead-end job with shitty pay and then have to deal with asshole patrons?

If COVID goes away, then restaurant employees will no longer be worried about their health.  They will also no longer be expected to be the COVID police.  That is going to result in fewer irate patrons.  That should translate into happier employees and more business.

If there are more restaurants chasing the diner's dollar, that should put pressure on restaurants to keep their prices down.  And that should translate to less inflation.  A similar analysis can be applied to many other industries.

So, there are many reasons to believe that our current bout of inflation will be a transient one.  Does that mean that it will be gone in a month or three?  No!  But we are already seeing signs that inflation is starting to moderate.  It will take a while, but we will get there.

The press will still be able to come up with scary inflation stories for a few more months.  As long as they can compare the current situation to how things were early last year, the current numbers will look bad by comparison.  But that ploy will stop working at some point.  And when it does, the stories will disappear, as if by magic.

The Fed is in a better position to deal with the inflation problem than at any other time I am aware of.  And, as I said, I have studied many decades of Fed policy and how well it has or hasn't worked.   They have the tools, and they know how to use them.  We will be fine as long as they are allowed to do so.

And the Fed won't be going it alone.  There are other forces in play that will also be pushing in the direction of inflation moderating.

Good news.