Ahem. Talk about invoking the American technological sublime! Yikes.

Energy has not always been conceived the same way, at least by oil companies like Humble, a forefather of Exxon.

This giant glacier has remained unmelted for centuries. Yet the petroleum energy Humble supples—if converted into heat—could melt it at the rate of 80 tons each second! To meet the nation’s growing needs for energy, Humble has applied science to nature’s resources to become America’s Leading Energy Company. Working wonders with oil through research, Humble provides energy in many forms — to help heat our homes, power our transportation, and to furnish industry with a great variety of versatile chemicals. Stop at a Humble station for new Enco Extra gasoline, and see why the “Happy Motoring” Sign is the World’s First Choice!

Via Grist

In poking around the Atomic Energy Commission’s technical reports archive, you come across some stupendous documents about how the world was going to deal with nuclear war. The marriage of the bureaucratic of the apocalyptic produces deranged offspring with very detailed models.

One 1960 Atomic Energy Commission report on a prospective 100-person post-apocalyptic “Group Shelter” is a case study of how to render an unthinkable future in the material language of the model railroad builder.

At one level, the report just describes a building that would have air intake and food and dining that could survive a series of nuclear blasts to provide shelter for a few weeks. At another level, it’s an insane fantasy of how to build an island of normalcy when the world has been destroyed. I’m reminded of BLDGBLOG and Edible Geography’s current project on Landscapes of Quarantine, which looks at the spaces that are used to contain prospectively dangerous people or things. Nuclear fallout structures invert the concept of quarantine: It’s not the world that needs to be protected from you but you that needs to be protected from the world. In effect, everything outside the space is disease.

Amidst the talk about withstanding blast pressure of 5000 pounds per square foot and reducing the radiation intensity relative to Out There by a factor of 10,000, we find little hints of the life that was expected to continue within.

The toilets permit “normal water flushing for maximum cleanliness.” Ah, just like home. “Facilities are provided for controlling and dispensing food and for heating soup, coffee, and baby bottles.” That line is about as close to a Hemingway six-word short story as it gets. (Fallout shelter with baby bottles. Used.) “The dining and recreation area is furnished with tables and benches, which may also be used for playing games of various kinds.” But no duck-duck-goose because “physical exertion would raise the body-heat output and increase the shelter temperature unnecessarily.” Thus, it makes sense to limit games to those “requiring little or no physical exertion” like bridge. Of course, “reading material and hobby craft can be utilized to occupy and relax the inhabitants.” Curling up with a book is pretty comforting, sometimes, right?

In the “Operating Manual” for the shelter, there are just the barest hints of the darkness that might encroach into the pinochle games.

As the people are admitted and the living community is organized, the group leader should consider the following sociological aspects affecting human behavior which may require action.

1. Weapons: During an extended period of living under the difficult conditions unavoidably present, there are likely to be psychological upsets among the occupants. Possession of weapons of any sort could be dangerous and perhaps disastrous.

Perhaps the understatement of the century? Living in a post nuclear America equals “difficult conditions”!

2. Beverages: Alcoholic beverages under some conditions are perhaps beneficial and unobjectionable. In the circumstances of living in close confines, care would certainly have to be exercised in the dispensing of alcoholic beverages…

3. Matches and Smoking: Again, the regulation of these items may depend in large degree upon the composition of the community.

In the event of nuclear holocaust, perhaps a smoke and a few dozen beers would be the rational human choices. At the very least, if you allow weapons into your shelter, you’d have to allow smokers a little nicotine.

4. Money and valuables: People entering the shelter can be expected to have brought whatever of their money and valuables they could salvage. Locked storages are provided in the shelter for use at the group leader’s discretion.

Looking back, it doesn’t seem like a serious enterprise to build models of fallout shelters complete with tiny little beds and lockers for diamond earrings and an astroturf covering. Yet we did it. Lee Clarke calls them “fantasy documents.” Because that’s the thing — these are not dystopian visions. In fact, they exclude just about everything that would actually happen in a nuclear war and focus (narrowly, narrowly) on the tiny little space that could still be controlled and normal. The building in the AEC report might not represent a perfect world, but relative to the world surrounding it, it would be an island of Eden.

Realistic? Nope. But what else were you going to do when faced with the possibility of the end of civilization but deal with it with the tools of bureaucratic normalcy. Hold conferences on designing for the nuclear city, have meetings on preparedness, build little high-tech hobbit holes where one could wait for better times. Faced with nuclear war, most people just wake up sweating and go check on their sleeping children. Within organizations, though, the questions lose their existential heft. They enter the hum-drum: It was someone’s job to imagine nuclear war and then design the best escape hatch and periscope for a post-apocalyptic shelter. Humans are amazing.

It’s in this context of the engineering of the post-holocaust that we have to consider nuclear power at this time. These bureaucratic visions of a world after nuclear war were the tamest expression of the fear of nuclear war. Studies came out about the effects of nuclear fear on schoolchildren. The kids said things like, “If I was in school when the bomb dropped and I hid under some wall or something, and I came out alive and came home and found my family was gone, disappeared with everything, who’d want to live anyway?”

The scientists who worked on the bomb project were well-aware that something new was upon the world as a result of their work. Oppenheimer was famously guilt-wracked. Others less so. Alvin Weinberg makes it clear, though, that his redemption went straight through atomic power. Talking about a (loss leader) price list that General Electric put out in 1964, he described his elation at the moral dimension of the commercialization of nuclear power.

I find it hard to convey to the reader the extraordinary psychological impact the GE economic breakthrough had on us. We had created this new source of energy, this horrible weapon: we had hoped that it would become a boon, not a burden. But economical power—something that would vindicate our hopes—this had seemed unlikely… [B]ecause we all wanted to believe that our bomb-tainted technology really provided humankind with practical, cheap, and inexhaustible energy we were more than willing to take the GE price list at face value.

Thus, the very people who might have been expected to rein in the corporate actors — GE and Westinghouse — from getting carried away with outlandishly low cost estimates were part of the same group. They really, really wanted nuclear power to work and on the cheap. How else to balance the apocalyptic visions that lay on the other side of the periscope?

“We have no language at our command by which to convey to the minds of our readers any adequate idea of the agitated state at the time we saw [the well]. The gas from below was forcing up immense quantities of oil in a fearful manner and attended with noise that was terrifying… When the gas subsided for a few seconds, the oil rushed back down the pipe with a hollow, gurgling sound, so much resembling the struggle and suffocating breathings of a dying man, as to make one feel as though the earth were a huge giant seized with the pains of death and in its spasmodic efforts to retain a hold on life was throwing all nature into convulsions.”
Jim Burchfield, editor, Titusville Gazette, on seeing one of the first wells ever sunk

And so, with a series of scenes like this following the sinking of Edwin Drake’s first well, the age of oil began. It was 1859, exactly 150 years ago Thursday, that Drake’s great success occurred.

Drake, working with a local, simply pounded a hole in the ground with a heavy piece of metal attached to a rope threaded through a pulley to a steam engine. It took weeks of “chipping” to go the 59 feet where they struck oil. It would have happened without the narrative-friendly character of Drake, but it hadn’t, and the world hasn’t been the same since.

A western Pennsylvania river valley seems an unlikely place to go looking for momentous change, but the historical fact is that the Oil Creek valley, about 100 miles north of Pittsburgh, was the world’s very first oil field. From 1859 to 1873, this was the largest oil field in the world. During that time, 56 million barrels of oil came out of the ground.

Take note of the description of the stereograph above: “Source of the world’s most gigantic fortunes — pumping wells in the oil country — western Pennsylvania.” It took a few years to really get going and really only produced near capacity for half a decade, but it made millionaires. In just the six years from 1859-1865, $17 million was made in this backwater part of the country.

But as quickly as it flowed onto the world scene, Oil Creek valley went dry and everyone packed up and went home. Or to Texas.

Oil didn’t send cars zooming around or get turned into plastics back then. We just burned it in lamps as a replacement for a set of illumination alternatives that weren’t quite right for the task.

There was whale oil, but that was getting tougher to find. Whalers spent more and more months farther and farther away from population centers to fill up their barrels with bounty from the most majestic creatures in the world. And even if you killed a hundred whales, you were only bringing back a few hundred barrels of oil.

There was pig-derived oil, too, and gas made from coal. Brian Black, in his book, Petrolia from which the top quote comes, notes that there were already 56 coal-to-gas plants operating by 1850.

New lamps introduced in the 50s allowed allowed consumers to burn pretty much anything they wanted, decreasing the cost of switching fuels.

“Each illuminant helped bring light to darkness,” Black wrote. “However, each product left dramatic room for improvement. While each development functioned to lay groundwork for the rapid acceptance of petroleum upon its ‘discovery,’ the coal oil industry, which grew significantly in the United States during the 1850s, achieved a national distribution network that could be shifted most easily to other fluid energy commodities.”

So, there was a market and ecosystem awaiting the product that could fulfill “the divine potential of increasing time in the day.” Some people had discovered that “rock oil” could be distilled, just like whale oil, but it was too much of a pain in the ass to collect where it seeped up to the surface. People sometimes skimmed the crude from the surface of the waters where it naturally got stuck or sopped it up with blankets. (Some even used it as a tonic. They “drank freely of the water, which, by and by, ‘operated as a gentle purge.’”) Not exactly the way to go from rags to riches.

Drake’s well then, with its flowing petroleum, changed everything. It pumped money out of the ground.

While the Civil War raged, the development of the area was basically stalled, but as soldiers returned from the front lines, they went to rural Pennsylvania to hunt fortune. Instant towns popped up all over Petrolia: Titusville, Oil City, and especially Pithole. Distribution systems sprung up, too. Teamsters drove horse-carts lousy with barrels. Barges were loaded up to float down the rivers. Tank services arose.

Petroleum, long just a curiosity became, with admirable simplicity, money.

The stereographs below — taken over the couple decades after 1859 — show many of these events in progress. There are shots of new hotels and the tanks and the derricks, even the basic refineries. An incredible set of pictures testifies to the prevalence of “shooting a well.” This was and is the practice of putting explosives in a borehole to stimulate oil production by fracturing the rock down there. Word was, it let the oil flow more easily.

“A gentleman who has just called on us from Tarr farm, tells us that an experiment was made on the 21st, with one of Roberts’ Torpedoes in the ‘Bakery Well’ which has formerly pumped from 7 to 8 barrels per day. The production has continually increased. On the 27th it produced 60 barrels and yesterday the production was 100 barrels,” proclaimed the July 2, 1866 edition of the Titusville Morning Herald. “We wonder how the owners feel at the great difference in their balance sheet!”

The technique was pioneered by Colonel E.A.L. Roberts, whose corporate descendant wrote a stunning short history of its use in the Oil Creek valley. Apparently, it was quite a high-drama technology. You see, Roberts had patented it (as in the drawing) and anyone caught “moonlighting” by blasting their wells without paying the Roberts Petroleum Torpedo Company (!) was in serious trouble with its private police force.

Enjoy the stereographs below. They’re beautiful. The thumbnails will open each one in your main browser window; sorry about that, I’m just getting this Wordpress gallery thing down.

All of them are courtesy of the Robert Dennis Collection of Stereoscopic Views.

"Going to Petroleum Centre"

What Was a Farm is Now a (Oil) Field

Up Oil Creek Without a Paddle

Not All Roads Are Made Equal

An Instant Hotel, Like Mardi Gras Without the Parades

Oil City, Pennsylvania

A Railroad Bridge Supported by Derricks

Big Derricks, Little Man

Derricks Downslope

The Derrick Forest

Pumping, Close-Up

Filling a Shell with Nitroglycerine

Shooting a Well

That's A Lot of Barrels

Barrels Everywhere

Men Standing on Oil Tanks

A Lotta Oil Tanks

Cameraderie Among the Tanks

A Barge on Oil Creek

The Original Oil Tankers

The "Great" Western Refinery

What Looks Like a Fire

A Huge Smoking tank

Instant Towns Ain't Pretty

The coal-industry lobbying group, Families Organized to Represent the Coal Economy, has released a kids’ coloring book starring Power Rock (“POWER ROCK!”) and his sidekick, Squirt. Yes, it’s as weird as it sounds, but it’s not unprecedented.

Joel Eisen (@joeleisen), University of Richmond law professor, pointed out to me that it is really just “Reddy Kilowatt redux.” This humanoid is Reddy Kilowatt:

Reddy Kilowatt was born on March 11, 1926, the fine work of  Ashton B. Collins, general commercial manager of the Alabama Power Company.

“Collins, just home from an industry convention where a big problem under discussion was how to sell electricity as a servant of mankind, was gazing out the window into a thunderstorm, wondering what an electric servant might look like,” Toonopedia summarized the PR handout about Collins’ big moment. “All of a sudden, two lightning bolts merged and struck the ground as one. For a split-second, they reminded Collins of a human figure, and at that moment Reddy Kilowatt sprang from his brow full-grown, like Athena from that of Zeus.”

How could we sell electricity as a servant? Wait! Draw electric bolts with a vaguely human form! It’d be almost like, like-a, like a human servant but just made of electricity! Of course… It’s almost too easy.

(The story reminds me of the scene in Wayne’s World where Noah Vanderhoff’s wife describes her flash of insight about naming his arcades, Noah’s Arcades. “I just opened my mouth and out it came!” she says, beaming. “You’re a lucky man, Mr. Vanderhoff,” replies Robe Lowe.)

In any case, Reddy went viral, among investor-owned utilities at least. He became the mascot (or mascoto) for more than 300 power companies. In the standard rendering, his torso and extremities are made of lightning bolts. His head is a lightbulb and his ears are sockets. In the 50s, he sang jingles, in keeping with the times. The YouTube video below features this excellent verse:

[voce di castrato]

I wash and dry your clothes
Play your radios
I can heat your coffee pot
I am always there
With lots of power to spare
Because I’m Reddy Kilowatt

[spoken, not sung, climbing into wall outlet]
Remember: Just Plug In
I’m Reddy!

Thomas Pynchon himself wishes he’d penned those lines.

But before we get into the cult of Reddy and the story of his battle with a knockoff, Willie Wiredhand, we should talk about why these mascots are important.

It’s funny to laugh at these weird, old animated figures, but they clearly meant something to the companies who used them. They were — first and foremost — effective marketing gimmicks. That should make us wonder: if electricity was so obviously great, as most technologists would contend, why did the utilities have to push it with lame mascots? Wasn’t it just, like, something people wanted?

Well, the investor-owned utilities in the cities and suburbs had a very specific task. They needed to promote electricity demand so they could justify building new plants. That was how they got paid, so they had to get people to abandon other ways of doing work and providing heating and cooling.

Get rid of the clothesline and put your clothes in the electric dryer! Why wash your own dishes by hand? Just get a dishwasher! Don’t open the windows and endure 77 degree temperatures, get an air conditioner! Once you’ve got that demand up-and-running through, you need to match the load for the winter. So, you start pitching electric space heaters, when insulation, proper house engineering, and a decent furnace might have done the trick.

The point here is that electricity wasn’t a panacea. It could help you do some things, but the choices were marginal. Maybe you could use electricity, but maybe something else worked just as well. For consumers, the choice wasn’t clear cut. There were other options for providing comfortable living aside from the very, very high energy home. (This is a story admirably told by Adam Ward Rome in his book The Bulldozer in the Countryside in the chapter, “From the Solar Home to the All-Electric House: The Postwar Debate Over Heating and Cooling.”)

If you were a utility, though, you did not have other options; you had to sell more power to grow. So, they pushed hard to increase electricity demand. Sounds nuts now, but the only demand response that the companies of the mid-century wanted was, “More please!” It’s important to remember that when you look at a chart plotting the rapid growth of electricity sales. The technology alone didn’t do that; companies and individuals did.

Many of the electricity marketing campaigns were conducted in conjunction with, or spiritually related to, the nuclear power push of the 50s and 60s. Economist Steven Cohn and long-time Oak Ridge National Laboratory director Alvin Weinberg have independently documented that nuclear optimism pervaded the electricity industry and while most people in the know thought the “too cheap to meter” stuff was nonsense, they did think that nuclear power would be much cheaper than the alternatives. (The low, low price of nuclear power turned out to be bogus for so many reasons that it’s another story.)

Imagine, though, that you were expecting to have a permanent monopoly with a product that was getting much cheaper to produce. It made sense to get big to compete with the other utilities.

The only problem is that from a thermodynamic point of view, it’s ridiculous to use electricity to heat homes. This is a point made by many engineers throughout the last half-century. By the time the electricity comes out of your plug, something like two-thirds of the heat value of the fuel that went into the generator has been lost. That might be an acceptable conversion ratio for making lumps of coal into electricity if you need high-quality power for your computer. But if what you wanted is the heat in the first place, it’s kind of silly.

Despite the lack of technical intelligence in such a system, the electric industry succeeded in getting millions of homes built without energy efficiency in mind. These houses locked millions of Americans into homes that need lots of energy to keep comfortable. Regionally appropriate building techniques, advocated in books like Design with Climate, were ignored.  They were replaced by cheap homes that substituted cheap energy for design. The homes are part of the infrastructure that makes the United States such a high-energy place.

In short, for both consumers and environmentalists, this housing stock is bad news. They are a major part of the infrastructure that makes the United States vulnerable to high energy prices. And old Reddy Kilowatt and his merry friends are partially responsible.

Ok, enough serious talk, let’s get back to the funny. Reddy effectively wired his way into the consciousness of a particular generation. He made TV appearances. He showed up in “kite safety” comic books with the Brady Bunch and Road Runner and Brer Rabbit. Granite Falls High School adopted the Kilowatt as their mascot. There were even knock-offs of old Reddy, like Willie Wiredhand, who represented the co-op utilities of the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association.

Willie’s creation story is actually quite like Reddy’s, but with the addition of beer.

“We were toying with ideas for a rural electrification symbol,” an old-time editor of the NRECA’s trade mag recalled. “I had tossed out the idea that the symbol ought somehow to portray rural electric service as the farmer’s hired hand, which in those days was almost the entire PR story we had to get across. Drew picked up both the idea and a sketch-pad one night at our home after a couple of beers.”

And there you had it, Willie was born. His legs were the prongs of the electric plug, his body the wire. He wore gloves and was tough.

The only problem was that Willie, by the reckoning of the investor-owned utilities as represented by Reddy Kilowatt, Inc., was a blatant knock-off of Kilowatt himself. It certainly didn’t help matters that Willie represented an organization, NRECA, that the private utilities had assaulted as being a socialistic enterprise.

In fact, Reddy Kilowatt, Inc., sued over the infringement and lost after a judge delivered what will go down as one of the funniest opinions ever to scoot out of the Appellate Court.

It should be a classic of jurisprudence. Here, the Appellate judge quotes from a District judge decision in which he recited the list of animated industrial characters that had been produced prior to Collins’ flash of insight.

‘Long prior to the adoption of Reddy Kilowatt by Collins, animated characters had been in common and widespread use as trade marks, and in advertising, promotion and public relations work for all kinds of products and services. Exhibits D-W; D-X; D-DD and D-EE are collections of such materials. Exhibit D-X is a collection of 258 registrations of animated characters granted by the U.S. Patent Office, illustrating the wide use of such characters as trade marks for a great variety of products and services. The fanciful, animated, humanized character made up from mechanical or electrical parts for use in advertising and promotional work did not originate with Collins. See Exhibit D-EE showing the following: Saturday Evening Post June 10, 1911, Hot Point, Miss Glad Iron and Miss Sad Iron, showing an animated electric iron; Saturday Evening Post (1920) French Battery & Carbon Co., showing Mr. Ray-O-Lite in connection with batteries. This character has a badge made up of jagged lines to simulate lightning or electricity. Other animated characters are there shown.

‘Prior to the date of Collins’ first license agreement on January 2, 1934, other animated characters were used as shown in Exhibit D-EE, including Planters Mr. Peanut, Ingram’s animated shaving cream jar and tube, Three Minute animated oat kernels and animated characters by Arkansas Power & Light Company, named ‘The Kilo-Watts’. Other advertisements showing animated characters used concurrently in advertising with Reddy Kilowatt include an animated telephone of the Bell System (1950); animated character, Mr. Plug-In (1942); an animated fluorescent light tube, and an animated electrical figure, Katie Kord. Items 68-73 of Exhibit D-D, all published in the nineteenth century show, respectively, an animated oil bottle, animated green peas and radishes, an animated insecticide bottle and hats and flatirons. Item 74 shows an animated ear of corn published in 1909 and Item 75 shows a gas light and an electric light in animated form named, respectively, ‘Miss Cubic Foot’ and ‘Miss Kilo Watt’, published in 1916. Exhibit D-RR is a group of magazines published by American Waterworks Association showing the use of an animated drop of water. It is humanized and is delivering messages and performing functions of the public water supply service in much the same way that plaintiff’s character has been used to personalize electric service. The character is known as ‘Willing Water’. The use of such characters for such purpose was in the public domain and plaintiff has no exclusive right to the use of animated characters in the electrical field.’”

In his later years, Reddy got made into a live-action character and that wasn’t good for anyone. He, or she, really, ended up on a small-market television station shilling for coal with a depressing, possibly drunken clown called Mr. Toot. It was a sad end for an important personification, but if you want to relive the glory years, just visit reddykilowatt.org for dozens of posts on America’s favorite lightning beam animated character with a lightbulb for a head.

One of the most optimistic predictions came from Thornton Bradshaw, president of Atlantic Richfield, who thought that the U.S. could reduce its dependence on foreign oil from 18% of total energy consumption now “to perhaps as low as 15% by 1980 and possibly 10% to 13% by 1985.” Most other speakers, including Sawhill, guessed that the U.S. would be importing 25% of its oil eleven years from now, v. about one third early this year.

In a TIME article entitled, “Project Realism,” a play on Nixon’s half-hearted Project Independence, we find these forecast gems. Thornton Bradshaw is admirably close to the money about U.S. oil imports as a percentage of U.S. energy consumption. In fact, in 1985, oil imports represented 14% of total consumption which is close to his range.

As for the other guys, 11 years after they made their prediction, the U.S. was dependent on imports for 27% of its petroleum needs, so they were pretty close, too. It’s hard to know whether they banked on the brief Alaskan oil boom, which kept down U.S. oil imports until the late 80s, or were just lucky.

By 1990, we were importing 42% of our oil.  Now, that number is 60%.

[Source: Time Magazine]

This excellent data comes to us courtesy of the paper, “A half century of US federal government energy incentives:
value, distribution, and policy implications” by economists Roger H. Bezdek and Robert Wendling of Management Information Services. Granted, renewable energy has gotten more backing since 2003, but the overall trends are still good.

Paired with my previous All You Need to Know post about energy R&D, you can see how little the U.S. government has really invested in developing non-fossil, non-nuclear power. I’ll have more on these issues soon, but if you want a good primer on U.S. energy tax policy, particularly as it relates to the oil industry and the “depletion allowance” take a look at this succinct Congressional briefing.

In the top graph, it’s important to note that I included big hydro — you know, the Hoover Dam, etc — into the green tech number. Otherwise, as you can see in the bottom graph, Federal support for green tech has been miniscule. Renewables have received just about 5% of total energy incentives from the government. Add in geothermal and you get to 6%.

Here’s the Google doc that generated the charts above.

“In view of the fact that the earth in its natural state could hardly support more than about ten million food-gatherers, the maximum consumption of energy by humans in preagricultural times probably amounted to no more than the equivalent of about four million tons of coal annually.”

— Harrison Brown, “Energy in Our Future” from the 1976 Annual Review of Energy

Given that the U.S. uses about 1.1 billion tons of coal per year now, I began to wonder how total American energy consumption stacked up to our pre-farming ancestors total energy usage.

Four million tons of coal would have yielded about 90 million BTUs back in 1976. Americans use about 100 quadrillion BTUs of energy each year. So, do a little math, divide 100 quadrillion by 90 million, then divide by some time unit and voila: Americans burn through 90 million BTUs — what our hunter-gatherer ancestors used each year — in about 8 hours.

Hell, we burn four million tons of coal every 32 hours or so.

(This makes me think. Do we need a sort of fossil debt clock that counts up all the fossil fuel BTUs we’ve burned?)

Illustration of the "terrible conflagration" of a steamboat explosion from 1856.

Dickens made a trip from Pittsburgh down past Louisville to the Mississippi on the Ohio River, which he recorded in evocative detail in his American Notes. Granted, he sounds like a bit of pansie, but his descriptions of the danger of the ships is fascinating. The furnace and all its machinery were open to the passengers, who according to Dickens, often found themselves proximity to its fires.

Worse, according to the newspaper report from 1838 at the right, there was a real misalignment of incentives for boat captains. The safety of the ships was inversely correlated with their speed. The more steam that the captains could “hold onto” the more pressure would exist and the faster the boat could go. But a little too much pressure and — BANG! — you’ve got a boiler bomb.

Dickens, with far greater command of the English language:

“…these western vessels are still more foreign to all the ideas we are accustomed to entertain of boats.  I hardly know what to liken them to, or how to describe them.

“In the first place, they have no mast, cordage, tackle, rigging, or other such boat-like gear; nor have they anything in their shape at all calculated to remind one of a boat’s head, stem, sides, or keel.  Except that they are in the water, and display a couple of paddle-boxes, they might be intended, for anything that appears to the contrary, to perform some unknown service, high and dry, upon a mountain top.  There is no visible deck, even:  nothing but a long, black, ugly roof covered with burnt-out feathery sparks; above which tower two iron chimneys, and a hoarse escape valve, and a glass steerage-house.  Then, in order as the eye descends towards the water, are the sides, and doors, and windows of the staterooms, jumbled as oddly together as though they formed a small street, built by the varying tastes of a dozen men:  the whole is supported on beams and pillars resting on a dirty barge, but a few inches above the water’s edge:  and in the narrow space between this upper structure and this barge’s deck, are the furnace fires and machinery, open at the sides to every wind that blows, and every storm of rain it drives along its path.

“Passing one of these boats at night, and seeing the great body of fire, exposed as I have just described, that rages and roars beneath the frail pile of painted wood:  the machinery, not warded off or guarded in any way, but doing its work in the midst of the crowd of idlers and emigrants and children, who throng the lower deck:  under the management, too, of reckless men whose acquaintance with its mysteries may have been of six months’ standing:  one feels directly that the wonder is, not that there should be so many fatal accidents, but that any journey should be safely made.”

As an antidote to this year’s Darwin-mania, we celebrate a piece of science from 1859 that wasn’t remotely controversial at the time, but which underpins the hottest political potato of our era: climate change. In May 1859, six months before the publication of On the Origin of Species, Irish physicist John Tyndall proved that some gases have a remarkable capacity to hang onto heat, so demonstrating the physical basis of the greenhouse effect. Charles Darwin had journeyed round the world and ruminated for 20 years before presenting his inflammatory ideas on evolution. Tyndall spent just a few weeks experimenting in a windowless basement lab in London.

Via > @jennydeluxee > @history_geek

The rule, approved by the commission in a 4-to-0 vote, requires that new reactors be designed so their containment structure would remain intact after a plane crash, cooling systems would continue to operate and spent fuel pools would be protected.

The industry says that their simulations already show nuclear reactors holding up just fine under such an attack, but the ruling seems to indicate that not everyone is so sure. Post 9/11, nuclear reactors suddenly became more risky, as Vaclav Smil pointed out back in 2003’s Energy at the Crossroads, when he noted that the nuclear industry had been “naive” in the weak defensive measures for which they had advocated.

Risk isn’t just a public perception problem, it’s also a private money problem. Increased levels of risk — even if countermeasures are demonstrated — are just a fact of life for nuclear operators and that’s reflected in the risk premium that Wall Street financiers build into the rates at which they lend them money. The new rule probably won’t help as it could require new construction procedures that will be seen as unproven and thus more risky.

Nota bene: technology risk isn’t the only kind — and the cost per kilowatt hour of an electricity source isn’t fixed solely by technical factors. Society and the contingent events of history count.