EDITORIAL BY
JOHN W. CAMPBELL
One of the great Causes obsessing a lot of fanatics around the country is the Terribly Important matter of Ecology.
The following brief notes are offered in the hope that some of the Deeply Concerned members of that cult will become instead a bit more on the deep-thinking, as well as caring, side.
Basic proposition: Instant Experts are predictably like mutations; the odds are 999,999 to 1 that they'll be destructive in their Instant Answers.
There is nothing you can do that has only one effect; everything has side effects, bugs, complications, kick-back reactions and/or catastrophes built in.
The typical performance of the Instant Expert with Immediate and Simple answers, is to demand that the clear, simple and obviously necessary answer he's come up with must be implemented right away, and any reluctance to do so is proof of evil, selfish, greedy, or tradition-bound motives. The possibility that reluctance to use the shining, wonderful, simple new answer may stem from caution, and the recognition of the fundamental principle of You Can Never Do Just One Thing—fundamental, because it's the basic law of real ecology!
One simple example is heroin. Heroin is the Instant Answer to the problem of feelings of inadequacy, worry, and how to achieve a feeling of happiness and security. It definitely works, too. It demonstrably does make one feel warm, secure, happy, and competent.
The side effects can be ignored for now—we'll cross that bridge when we're ready, and besides, "I'm not gonna get hooked!"
Ralph Nader & Co. had one instant answer for the automotive manufacturers: he and his followers demanded the immediate installation of "energy-absorbing steering systems" in cars, right now. No more of this shilly-shallying and "It's not ready for use," delaying tactics allowed!
GM yielded to the public clamor and installed it in some of their cars.
It wasn't ready. The engineers had said it wasn't ready—that it hadn't been adequately tested and debugged. But Nader's dedicated followers knew better—they knew GM was holding back because of rock-headed traditionalism, lack of care for the people who rode their cars, and because it would cost money to build the new systems.
So the early installed-immediately-and-no-stalling! equipment proved to have some slight bugs. Like breaking the steering shaft if the front wheels hit a curb a bit too hard in parking.
All hail the victory of the Do It Right Away boys!
Then there is the great Concerned Ecologist (Instant Expert division) drive to get phosphates out of detergents, to stop the destruction of our lakes and streams, because they knew that phosphates in the sewage got into the waters, caused a great bloom of algae, which wound up depleting the waters of oxygen, and killing off nearly all the fish.
I fell for that one myself, being guilty of a false assumption: I assumed the biologists had actually done their job, and had actually made studies before blowing off their mouths in public.
This led to a great to-do about getting phosphates out of detergents, and major companies spent quite a few millions developing some kind of alternative to the use of phosphates that would be maybe half as effective. Their best bet was a complex derivative of cyanide—a nitrogen compound—that, while it wouldn't do the job alone, could do the job with about a quarter as much phosphate as before. Plants to produce the nitrogen complex were built, and production started ...
And then some studies were started on the biological degradation products of the complex—which turned out to include some interesting carcinogenic substances.
Unlike the phosphates, the nitrogen complex put a carcinogen in the streams and lakes; instead of getting algae, we got cancer-causers instead.
This quite abruptly dimmed the interest in the nitrogen complex. The latest Instant Answer was proving to be not quite so wonderful as the Instant Experts knew it was.
So now they were back to Square One?
No, because about then somebody had actually done his science homework—actually studied what caused the blooms of algae, and eutrophication of lakes. Turned out the algae had not been hungry for phosphates—it was lack of available nitrogen compounds that limited their growth. Phosphate detergents couldn't stimulate their growth; there was enough phosphate present anyway. It was nitrogenous material they needed—you know, something like that nitrogen-based replacement for those terrible phosphate detergents. The combination of phosphate and plenty of that nitrile complex would have been just the thing to really give the algae a boost!
In the meantime, a number of thoughtful two-bit companies had jumped into the breech, nobly offering "low-phosphate" detergents that all good Concerned Instant Ecologists were practically required to buy. One of these noble new detergents—Ecolo-G—turned out to be approximately fifty percent good old NaCl, plain salt.
It was definitely low-phosphate. And it wouldn't contribute a bit to the growth of algae in fresh-water ponds and streams. And besides, salt's a lot cheaper than suitable polyphosphates.
Incidentally, that sort of material is published fairly promptly in the technical journals, and the industrial trade journals (such as Chemical & Engineering News, the American Chemical Society's weekly newsletter) but is remarkably slow in appearing in any of the Concerned Liberal Press media.
Who, of the Concerned Instant Ecologists wants to get the news that he's been running hard, shouting loudly, in the wrong direction? That sort of thing is very bothersome to Instant Experts. Why bring it up in public?
Then there's the problem of low-lead gasolines.
This one was a slightly different problem, coming in two or more stages. Here the basic motivating problem was a real-pollution problem—not an hysterical-pollution problem. The worst of all the real-pollution generators is the automobile engine; it pours off highly toxic nitric oxides, carbon monoxide, lead bromide fumes, and partially oxidized hydrocarbons which produce extremely irritant "photochemical smog."
Except for the lead bromide fumes, which are the breakdown products of the anti-knock solution added to the gasoline, those pollutants are all the result of non-equilibrium combustion reactions. If the combustion in the cylinders lasted for seconds instead of milliseconds, and a fully adequate air supply were available, the CO would go to CO2, the unstable nitrogen oxides would break down to oxygen and nitrogen, and the hydrocarbons would complete their oxidation to CO2 and water.
If the exhaust fumes are passed over an effective catalyst, with an admixture of adequate air, they can be made to reach equilibrium, and harmless CO2, H20 and N2.
BUT—catalysts (the most effective being platinum metals) are rapidly poisoned and rendered useless by lead and bromine.
Therefore to make catalytic pollution-eliminators workable, the lead had to be removed from the gasoline.
So . . . the new low-lead or no-lead gasolines were developed. If you stick to the no-lead gasolines, and invest from $200 to $600 in platinum catalytic anti-pollution devices, you can have your car equipped for low-pollution exhaust. (For a while. Other things gradually poison the platinum, so the devices have to be replaced after some 6,000 to 10,000 miles. At $200 to $600 depending on the size and number your car needs.)
However, it now turns out that there's another bug in this scheme. To get a gasoline modern high-compression engines need (remaining Model T and Model A Fords, for instance, don't need high-octane gas, and can get along fine on plain old-fashioned "white gas"—ordinary gasoline with no lead.) it's necessary to use an inherently high-octane rating gasoline. Actually, straight octane itself would practically blow the heads off of a modern high-compression engine!
The way to achieve that is to use aromatic hydrocarbons, instead of all-straight-chain hydrocarbons. Benzene, the fundamental aromatic compound, is a magnificent, very-high-octane fuel. A darn sight more expensive than the straight-chain hydrocarbons that dominate in ordinary crude oil, these aromatics have to be synthesized in large, complex, expensive catalytic processing reactors.
But because of the "Ecology Now!" howls from the Instant Experts and the Caring Ecologists, the oil companies undertook the production of the new fuels—which was neither easy nor cheap.
Now the present situation is that catalytic exhaust afterburners simply aren't around—oh, you can get one, if you've got the money, and try hard, and can find some mechanic with knowledge enough to install it—and the new, up-to-50%-aromatic low-lead or no-lead gasolines are around and are being used.
And it's now found that the partially burned hydrocarbons coming out the exhaust aren't the simple straight-carbon-atom-chain acids, aldehydes, ketones and alcohols of the old gasolines—they contain a lot of complex aromatic semi-oxidized substances.
Among which are at least four of the most intensely carcinogenic compounds known.
So now, instead of the lead poisoning—which we can treat very effectively with chelates—of the old gasolines, we get cancer-causers. Cancer we can't treat very well.
Hail the great victory of the Instant Ecology Experts! They made those uncaring manufacturers do what they should! No more stalling—no more holding back on Important Things for mere dilly-dallying research to investigate consequences! "Do it! Do it now, like we say!"
In California, the Instant Ecology Experts have scored another triumph.
One of the Edison companies had built a new natural-gas-fired power plant well out of the city. The organized "Do what we say now!" ecologists launched a campaign, and forced the Edison Company to agree not to use their new plant—equipped with modern stack-gas filters—at its designed power, and thus forced the company to run the old, oil-fueled power plant, with inadequate stack-gas filters (it wasn't originally designed for filtering) in the city. The old plant is inefficient both because of antiquated design, and because of age; the company's plan had been to eliminate the plant entirely.
Hail the triumph of the Concerned Ecologists!
All across the country, Concerned Ecologists have been fighting and winding their battles to prevent the use or construction of nuclear power plants. Already completed and ready-to-go power plants have been stopped by legal injunctions thanks to the wise Caring Ecologists.
Who don't have the foggiest notion what the hell they're talking about, of course.
Those oh-so-concerned "ecologists" aren't ecologists, never have been, and apparently never will be. The essence of ecology is an extremely complex interactive web of multiple forces; to start to be a genuine ecologist, you'd have to start with a full course in the technology of system analysis, add some higher matrix mathematical analysis, a year or two of physics, another couple of years of biochemistry; and then get some experience with real life-system patterns, and learn to truly understand why wolves are so necessary for healthy, vigorous and contented deer.
You can not get any simple, sure, certain answers from any genuine ecologist—he'll give you tentative answers full of words no slogan-writer would ever use such as "possibly," "probably," and "so far as is known" and "of course it's never been adequately studied" and even "we just don't know."
It takes the Instant Experts and the Caring Ecologists who don't have the slightest idea of the real complexity of problems—and are too arrogant to admit the possibility of their ignorance—to have sure, simple, certain answers.
With respect to nuclear power plants, the Instant Experts exert their powerful emotional reasoning, and their minute understanding to the utmost.
In New York City they've blocked the use of a nuclear reactor intended solely for research studies; Columbia University built it so that courses in modern physics would be possible.
Here the ecology freaks joined forces with other anti-technology groups to suppress something necessary to an adequate study course in physics.
Since these Caring Ecologists are not to be influenced by mere facts ("Don't try to give me all those facts! You know I've made up my mind and you're just trying to confuse me!"), they can't be argued with. Typically, they have "non-negotiable demands."
For one thing, they keep talking about the awful danger of the power reactor going out of control and becoming an atomic bomb, devastating everything for miles around, and spreading deadly fallout all over the state.
The fact is that the Sun is a lot more apt to go Nova next January 1st than that a power reactor would detonate in an atomic explosion. You know that TNT is made from coal, and you know all those tons and tons of coal the local coal-burning power plant has in its reserve pile? Just think what an awful explosion that's going to make ...
Well—TNT is made from coal, isn't it? So that coal pile can explode, can't it, because it's got TNT in it, hasn't it?
No, Junior, it won't explode, because it takes a damn complex and difficult procedure to get the toluene out of coal-tar, purify it, tri-nitrate it, and get TNT from coal.
Your local granite mountain is full of uranium; Manhattan Island must contain tens of thousands of tons of U-235 in its stupendous tonnage of granite, so obviously Manhattan Island must be in imminent danger of blowing the State of New York off the map, huh?
Two years of intense research, plus two billion dollars worth of enormous industrial complexes, were necessary to extract the necessary U235 and Pu-239, and to build the delicate mechanism to shape those whimsical metals into bombs. The stuff is nearly impossible to machine—it undergoes changes of crystalline form, volume and density by the mere fact of trying to machine it! It took years and tremendous effort to make the stuff go off at all.
Because of the enormous amounts of heat released when uranium starts reacting in nuclear chain reaction, unless exceedingly tricky special conditions are contrived—driving subcritical amounts into a super-critical configuration—in microseconds, no explosion occurs. The stuff simply gets hot, melts, and runs away from the place. And as soon as the exact geometrical arrangement of the super-purified, impurity-free metal is destroyed—the chain reaction dies out.
If it takes more than a millionth of a second to get the pieces into the correct arrangement—they never do get together, because they've melted, changed form, and don't fit.
A nuclear power reactor can not, by any wildest possible stretch of the imagination, detonate.
That is flatly as impossible as having a pile of coal explode because "it contains TNT, don't it?"
A nuclear reactor can "slag down"—which means that if by some incredible concatenation of highly improbable accidents, none of the safeguards designed into it functioned, and it really ran completely wild—completely unrestrained by any of the dozen or so independent safety systems—it would generate heat so great the entire reactor core would melt down into a bubbling pool of lava.
Which would promptly start cooling off, because the reactive uranium would no longer be pure enough to react—all the inert or neutron-absorbing substances in the reactor core structure would be mixed in with it, making it about as dangerous as those hundreds of thousands of tons of uranium in the granite of Manhattan Island. Which doesn't react solely because it's a cooled-down lava containing uranium and a lot of inert and/or neutron-absorbing impurities.
The fact that every granite mountain is a mass of low-grade uranium ore, and they do not react, is the ultimate proof that it takes a highly special arrangement of uranium to get a reaction going.
As soon as a reactor core overheats—it goes back to being a small mountain of low-grade uranium ore that doesn't have the right arrangement. End of reaction.
A nuclear reactor plant absolutely can not explode as an atomic bomb.
A nuclear reactor power plant, if it goes completely wild—absolutely uncontrolled—will destroy its functioning completely. And that prevents further nuclear reaction.
To prevent any possibility of danger, even if the reactor does go wild, or is deliberately sabotaged by a full team of trained experts, the entire reactor core is built inside a "containment shield".
The exact design of containment shields differ, but typically they consist of a sphere of eighteen-inch thick stainless steel—they had to develop a whole new technology to produce such massive castings!—inside a couple of feet of high-strength high-density concrete.
Several nuclear reactors, in various countries all over the Earth, have been operating quietly, successfully, and usefully for years. The only injuries yet recorded in power reactor operation have been of the ordinary industrial type—Joe slips and drops his hammer on Bill's left foot, and Bill's in the hospital a couple days while the doctors assort the broken bones and put them back where they belong.
But you can't convince an Ecology Freak. He's already made up his mind, and he's not going to let a few facts confuse The Cause.
So again and again, the Instant Experts have stopped the construction and operation of power plants an area badly needs, a nuclear plant that produces no pollutants in the biosphere, that does not upset the ecology, and forced the use of fossil fuel plants that inescapably produce noxious by-products.
Thermal "pollution" does not destroy ecology; the greatest effect it can have is to cause a shift of ecology from low-temperature species to slightly higher-temperature types.
If we had enough thermal pollution here in the New York metropolitan area, for instance, we might cause a shift of ecology such that the Juncos and Chickadees no longer came to winter in this area—and we got mocking birds in our magnolia trees instead.
This would be a terrible, awful devastation?
Recent studies by General Electric have shown that cooling towers for power plants can be so designed that they produce a huge vertical jet of hot air that drives upwards for thousands of feet, entraining vast volumes of the surrounding air with it. These jets, on a large scale, are capable of piercing and thus breaking up the kind of thermal inversions in the atmosphere that cause the severe smog days in Los Angeles, New York, and other large city areas.
Thermal "pollution" of this type may turn out to be the best cure for city-pollution.
If, that is, the Instant Expert Ecologists will let scientists do something rational.
The Editor.
