Philip Bethge

Category: Stories

  • The Stench of Money: Canada’s Environment Succumbs to Oil Sands

    Canada is home to the world’s third largest oil reserves. But extracting the black gold is difficult, and threatens to destroy both the surrounding environment and the homeland of native tribes. With protests growing against a planned US pipeline, the oil sands controversy threatens to spread south.

    Celina Harpe holds up the map like an indictment. “The oil companies are into Moose Lake now,” she says, angrily tapping the paper. Workers have apparently already begun surveying the land.

    “I cried when I heard that,” says Harpe, the elder of the Cree First Nation community based in Fort MacKay in the Canadian province of Alberta. “That’s where I was born.”

    Her feet are shod in moose-leather moccasins decorated with brightly-colored beads. Over her neatly-pressed trousers she wears a checked lumberjack shirt.

    Harpe gets up off her worn sofa and steps out onto the terrace of her blue-painted log cabin. The mighty Athabasca River is just a stone’s throw away. “We can’t drink the water anymore,” says Harpe, 72. Berries and medicinal herbs no longer grow in the woods. Even the moose have become scarce. Harpe wrings her wrinkled hands. “We can’t live off the land anymore,” she laments. “Our livelihood has been taken away from us, and they haven’t even asked if they can use the land.”

    An unequal battle is being waged in Alberta. Multinational oil companies are talking about the biggest oil boom in decades. Standing in their way are people like Celina Harpe, whose culture and health are threatened because the ground under their feet contains the planet’s third-largest reserves of crude oil.

    Geopolitical Significance

    Experts estimate that up to 170 billion barrels of crude oil could be extracted from Canada’s oil sands. Only Saudi Arabia and Venezuela have more black gold. In addition, the Alberta deposits are of huge geopolitical significance. Indeed, the US already buys more oil from neighboring Canada than from all the nations in the Persian Gulf region put together.

    Very soon, still more of the so-called bitumen could be helping to fire up the US economy. President Barack Obama wants to decide by the end of the year whether it is in his country’s interests to build a 2,700-kilometer (1,700-mile) pipeline from Alberta to Houston in Texas.

    This pipeline, named Keystone XL, could pump up to 1.3 million barrels of crude oil a day to refineries along the Gulf of Mexico. But whereas the industry is dreaming of an oil rush, protests against the plans are growing. Environmentalists spent two weeks in August and September demonstrating in front of the White House against the exploitation of Canada’s oil sands. Among others, they have the support of 10 Nobel Peace Prize winners, including the Dalai Lama and former Vice President Al Gore.

    The protesters’ rage is directed at a form of oil considered the world’s dirtiest. Ecologists are also worried about the fate of wetlands and water reservoirs along the route of the planned pipeline, including the Ogallala aquifer, which supplies no fewer than eight US states with water.

    Above all, the exploitation of the Canadian oil sands could also lead the US to put off seriously thinking about renewable energy sources for many decades to come. “The point is not to get ourselves hooked on the next dirty stuff,” says US environmentalist Bill McKibben, one of the spokesmen of the anti-oil sands movement. He thinks the exploitation of the sands would make it impossible for America to meet its CO2-reduction targets.

    ‘A Dirty Needle’

    “It’s [like] a drug addict reaching for a dirty needle from a fellow addict,” NASA climate researcher James Hansen says. “It’s crazy, and the president should understand that and exercise leadership and reject the pipeline.”

    Criticism of the plans is also coming from Europe. Only last week the European Commission decided to define oil extracted from oil sands as particularly harmful to the environment. If the European Parliament and EU member states agree, it will make it particularly expensive to import it into the European Union. Importers could, for example, be forced to invest in organic fuels to compensate for the increase in CO2 emissions. The Canadian government is opposed to such moves.

    The area around the town of Fort McMurray, a ramshackle assortment of ugly purpose-built houses in northeastern Alberta, is the epicenter of the oil sands industry. Beefy four-wheel-drive vehicles race along the town’s roads. In winter the temperatures fall to as low as minus 25 degrees Celsius (minus 13 degrees Fahrenheit). That’s when the locals retreat to the Boomtown Casino or the Oil Can Tavern, a neon yellow-illuminated bar of dubious repute.

    The first oil prospectors came to the region more than a century ago. The commercial exploitation of the oil sands began with the construction of the first extraction plants in the mid-1960s. Suncor and Syncrude were the first two companies involved, but rising oil prices have since attracted the industry’s giants, including Shell, ConocoPhillips and ExxonMobil.

    (-> read original article at SPIEGEL ONLINE international)

    Heavy equipment is used to dredge out a mixture of sand, clay, water and heavy oil created from the plankton of a primeval ocean. The upward thrust of the Rocky Mountains pushed the reserves into their present position about 70 million years ago. The area of Alberta underneath which the oil sands lie today is about the size of Iowa (see graphic on left).

    The Oil Sands Discovery Centre in Fort McMurray contains a sample of oil sand under a glass dome. Visitors can open a small hatch and smell the contents. Crumbled oil sand looks like coffee grounds, and stinks of diesel. It is the stench of big money.

    Some 40 kilometers (25 miles) from Fort McMurray, the smell hangs in the air day and night. The drive north along Highway 63 leads into the seemingly endless pine forests of the boreal climatic zone. But the woods soon open up, affording a clear view of the smokestacks of an immense industrial complex in the center of an apocalyptic-looking lunar landscape.

    Yellow sulfur tailings flash in the distance. Walls of earth surround a gigantic pit in which Caterpillar 797F industrial tippers are shunting to and fro. Each of these tippers can carry up to 360 metric tons of oil sand in a single load. Their wheels alone are four meters (13 feet) high. The plant is the Mildred Lake Mine belonging to the Syncrude company. Approximately 300,000 barrels of oil are produced on the site every day.

    Oil sands contain about 10 percent bitumen on average. To separate the oil from the mixture, the sand is put into a caustic soda solution at about 50 degrees Celsius (120 degrees Fahrenheit). The bitumen floats to the top of the slurry, from where it can be skimmed off. It is then upgraded to produce what is known as synthetic crude oil (see graphic).

    A Dirty Business

    This procedure enables more than 90 percent of the bitumen to be extracted from the oil sands. The only problem is what to do with the remaining few percent. Mixed with water, sand and clay, it ends up in huge storage basins that already span an area of about 170 square kilometers (65 square miles) in Alberta. The sand quickly sinks to the bottom, leaving a gel-like suspension of minute particulate matter that takes up to 30 years to settle.

    The sludge also contains heavy metals and chemicals. Environmentalists accuse the operators of allowing some of the water to seep into the ground. Indeed, elevated concentrations of lead, cadmium and mercury have been measured in the nearby Athabasca River and Canadian Indians speak of deformed fish and complain that their people are contracting rare forms of cancer. A definitive connection with the oil sands extraction, however, has not yet been made.

    From a hill at the edge of the Syncrude site you can look straight down into the ponds. Oily streaks cover the surface. Last October, 350 ducks landed here during a hailstorm. Their feathers covered in bitumen, they all had to be euthanized. Hollow shots from propane canons now echo across the seemingly endless plains to frighten other birds away. Scarecrows tied to oil barrels bob gently on the ponds.

    Biologists hired by the oil companies are trying to reclaim the land. The hill on the edge of the Syncrude site, for example, is directly above a former mine. A sign informs visitors that if they return in 20 years time, they will find “a landscape reclaimed with lakes, forests, wetlands,” an open invitation for “hiking and fishing.” For now, bison graze on a nearby meadow.

    Gripped by Desperation

    Environmentalists say this is all just greenwashing. “This land is definitely being destroyed forever,” says Melina Laboucan-Massimo, gazing scornfully across the artificial oasis surrounded by gouged out earth. The 30-year-old works as an energy expert for Greenpeace and fights for the rights of the first nations, as Canada’s native inhabitants are known. Laboucan-Massimo is herself a member of the Cree nation, and was born in the area.

    When she sees what is happening to her tribe’s traditional homelands, she seems to be gripped by desperation. Only last April, a pipeline burst just a few miles from her aunt’s house, spilling 4.5 million liters (1 million gallons) of oil.

    Although there are agreements between the native inhabitants and the Canadian state giving the first nations land and usage rights, it’s not clear what the contracts mean for the exploitation of the oil sands. The Canadian Supreme Court is currently considering an appeal by several first nations for a greater say in oil exploitation. Some 23,000 Canadian Indians still live in the oil sands area.

    “My father’s family lived off the land,” says Laboucan-Massimo. “My grandparents hunted, they fished, they trapped; they lived in a more symbiotic relationship with the earth.” Many native Canadians now work for the oil industry: “They are essentially getting paid to destroy their children’s future,” she says.

    For years now, Laboucan-Massimo has been fighting an exhausting battle against the industry. “So far they have only developed like 3 percent of the tar sands in Alberta,” she says. “I don’t have a lot of hope if they develop as much land as they want.”

    Numerous new opencast mines have already been approved; many others are still in planning. The prospect of a direct pipeline to heavy-oil refineries in Texas has prompted investors to reach for their checkbooks.

    Oil Tanks in the Forest

    The International Energy Agency predicts production of conventional oil will soon reach its peak. Oil production in Alberta, by contrast, could more than double to 3.5 million barrels a day by 2025. At today’s prices, that means that the oil sands in Canada, exploitable with today’s technology, are worth about $16 trillion.

    And production costs are falling constantly. Whereas a barrel of oil used to cost almost $75 to produce, new production methods promise to cut that to about $50.

    The eight-seater Beechcraft Super King Air 350, leased by Cenovus Energy, takes off into the skies over Fort McMurray. While the plane is gaining altitude, the shimmering Athabasca River comes into view. Then the mines. From the air they look like oozing wounds in the midst of the green forest. Soon square clearings can also be seen, each with its own oil derrick. Straight roads slice through the forest; the trails left by the geologists searching for the oil sands below.

    As the plane descends, oil tanks and chimneys appear near a lake. Christina Lake is the name of this Cenovus production plant, one of the world’s most modern. But there’s no sign of a mine; the oil sands at the site are being drilled here rather than dug up.

    About 80 percent of the oil sands in Canada are too deep to be retrieved using opencast mining. More than 50 years ago, US geologist Manley Natland came up with idea to separate oil and sand below ground rather than digging them up first. Natland suggested superheating the oil sands so that the bitumen liquefies and can be pumped to the surface. Only now are the required machines available. Engineers can now pump 250 degree Celsius (480 degree Fahrenheit) steam through a borehole and deep down into the ground.

    ‘10,000 Barbecues’

    Cenovus perfected the procedure at Christina Lake. The plant is currently undergoing a dramatic expansion. By the end of the decade, the planners hope it will be producing 258,000 barrels a day, enough to supply some 4 million US citizens with energy for 24 hours.

    “We expect to produce oil at this facility for more than 30 years,” says Drew Zieglgansberger of Cenovus. The youthful-looking manager in blue overalls leads the way to one of five towering steam generators that form the heart of the oil factory. Zieglgansberger climbs a ladder on the front of the gigantic structure and looks through a small window into the white-hot fire burning at 1,500 degrees Celsius (2,700 degrees Fahrenheit), turning water into super-heated steam. The plant generates as much heat as “10,000 barbecues,” the manager proudly declares.

    Operating the mammoth oven is a dirty business. Natural gas is burned to bring the machines up to their operating temperature. In fact the energy equivalent of a barrel of oil is needed to recover 10 barrels of oil. The European Commission has calculated that recovering oil from oil sands is about 22 percent more harmful to the environment than conventional crude oil. The US Environmental Protection Agency has even suggested it creates 82 percent more greenhouse gas emissions.

    But that’s not all: Heating bitumen also releases sulfur dioxide, nitrous oxides and heavy metals into the air, all of which later return to earth as acid rain. The Canadian Ministry for Natural Resources has confirmed that drilling generates twice the emissions as conventional oil production. Worse still, it’s not clear how drilling affects the water table. The independent Council of Canadian Academies regrets that such information is “absent.”

    Zieglgansberger accepts that there are problems. “Yes, we have the dirtiest oil in the world”, he openly admits. But it’ll be another 50 years before renewable energy can replace oil. “It is needed as a bridge to the next energy source.”

    Destined to Be Lost Forever

    Industry lobbyists are increasing their pressure on Washington. Pipeline operator TransCanada has close ties with the office of US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. The company’s current chief lobbyist was a top advisor to Clinton during the 2008 presidential primaries.

    Most analysts already assume that Obama will eventually authorize the Keystone XL pipeline. Too many jobs are believed to be on the line, and oil has too great a strategic significance to the US.

    Nevertheless, the pipeline’s opponents continue to rally their supporters. A human chain around the White House is planned for early November. However McKibben doubts it will have much of an impact. “The oil companies have more money than God,” he says.

    Time clearly appears to have run out for the native inhabitants of Alberta’s northeast. Their traditional way of life seems destined to be lost forever. Cenovus Manager Zieglgansberger takes a sober view of the situation: “We are now neighbors, whether they want us here or not.” The oil man is at pains to stress that he respects first-nation traditions. “We bring our stakeholders out with us before we do any disturbance,” Zieglgansberger assures us.

    Such respect seems to be rather limited. When tribal elders discovered a traditional burial ground on the site of one of the Cenovus plants, the oil company agreed to preserve the holy shrine.

    The cemetery now lies in the middle of the industrial complex on a tiny square of land spared from the lumberjacks.

    Now the native Indians must pass directly by the oil tanks to honor their dead.

    Translated from the German by Jan Liebelt

    (-> read original article at SPIEGEL ONLINE international)

  • Oil sands activist Melina Laboucan-Massimo: ‘What you do to the land you do to yourself’

    Melina Laboucan-Massimo, Climate campaigner with Greenpeace Canada and member of the Cree First Nation, on oil sands operations in northern Alberta, threats to her homeland, and the planned Keystone XL pipeline from Alberta to Houston, Texas.

    Q: US-president Barack Obama has to decide before the end of the year if TransCanada’s Keystone XL pipeline can go forward. Which effects would the construction have?

    Laboucan-Massimo: If this pipeline is built, the amount of tar sands that will be produced in Alberta is going to increase enormously. And thats problematic because we are already seeing unchecked tar sands development in Alberta. We are already hearing of contaminated water sources. We are already seeing the boreal forest being destroyed and the woodland caribou disappear from the areas where tar sands development takes place. It’s not a thriving, living ecosystem anymore. Also, there is a potential risk for leaks and spills all along the pipeline corridor, and TransCanada does not seem to be able to guarantee that a spill won’t happen. Part of the Keystone-Pipeline has already been built, and we have seen 12 spills already in its first year of operation.

    Q: What’s wrong with producing oil out of Alberta’s oil sands?

    Laboucan-Massimo: Oil from the tar sands is an unconventional fossil fuel. It is a lot harder to reach than conventional oil. It takes more energy, more water and results in more carbon emissions than conventional fossil fuel sources. The ecological footprint is huge. The oil companies have only developed about three percent out of the land they are seeking to exploit. If they develop as much as they want to, that is gonna be very problematic for the way that people live here.

    Q: You were born in this area. As a person connected to the land – how do you feel about the oil sands industry?

    Laboucan-Massimo: It really hurts my heart to see the effects on the land, the animals, the people and the water. Our cultural fabric is based off this land. My Dads side of my family was very connected to the land. They lived off the land, they hunted, they fished, they trapped, they lived in a more symbiotic relationship with the earth. Before colonization, the earth was in a pristine condition for a reason. The indigenous people that lived here had a deep understand and respect for the land. They had traditional ecological knowledge. They knew that what you do to the land you do to yourself. What we see now, however, is a disconnection between people and the earth. People cannot access certain parts of their traditional territories anymore because they are being cut off by the leases that are given out to multinational oil corporations who don’t have the same regard for the land as the people that have lived their for thousands of years.

    Q: What kind of impact do you see on the people?

    Laboucan-Massimo: People have called this resource a curse, and for good reason. There are serious health issues like respiratory illnesses, emphysema or asthma, and also elevated rates of certain cancers. We are not only seeing it in the people, we are seeing it in the animals too. People have found fishes in the Athabasca River that have tumors on them, that have crooked spines. Food, which was once extremely healthy, is now becoming contaminated.

    Q: But local people benefit a lot from the oil exploration.

    Laboucan-Massimo: I don’t agree with that, I see a lot of inequity. The community that I was born into for example still has no running water. Also, a lot of schools are being underresourced in the communities to this day. The industry likes to say ‘we provide jobs’, but how long will those jobs last? If it is a construction job, the job will be over when the plants are all set and done. Fact is: Its just a wage. You are getting paid to essentially destroy your children’s future. You are getting paid to be around toxic chemicals. You are getting paid to potentially have health effects in the future and to destroy the very land that your ancestors lived upon. Billions of dollars are taken out of resources from our traditional territories, and yet, this development is not benefiting the people that actually live here. It is benefiting the companies. And their people don’t live here. They don’t have to live out the consequences of the destruction of the land.

  • Oozing Biofuel: Algae Could Solve World’s Fuel Crisis

    Genetically modified blue and green algae could be the answer to the world’s fuel problems. Bioengineers have already developed algae that produce ethanol, oil and even diesel — and the only things the organisms need are sunlight, CO2 and seawater.

    Biochemist Dan Robertson’s living gas stations have the dark-green shimmer of oak leaves and are as tiny as E. coli bacteria. Their genetic material has been fine-tuned by human hands. When light passes through their outer layer, they excrete droplets of fuel.

    “We had to fool the organism into doing what I wanted it to do,” says Robertson, the head of research at the US biotech firm Joule Unlimited. He proudly waves a test tube filled with a green liquid. The businesslike biochemist works in a plain, functional building on Life Sciences Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

    His laboratory is sparsely furnished and the ceiling is crumbling. Nevertheless, something miraculous is happening in the lab, where Robertson and his colleagues are working on nothing less than solving the world’s energy problem. They have already created blue algae that produce diesel fuel.

    Scientists rave about a new, green revolution. Using genetic engineering and sophisticated breeding and selection methods, biochemists, mainly working in the United States, are transforming blue and green algae into tiny factories for oil, ethanol and diesel.

    Betting Millions on Algae

    A green algae liquid sloshes back and forth in culture vats and circulates through shiny bioreactors and bulging plastic tubes. The first tests of algae-based fuels are already being conducted in automobiles, ships and aircraft. Investors like the Rockefeller family and Microsoft founder Bill Gates are betting millions on the power of the green soup. “Commercial production of crude oil from algae is the most obvious and most economical possible way to substitute petroleum,” says Jason Pyle of the California-based firm Sapphire Energy, which is already using algae to produce crude oil.

    The established oil industry is also getting into the business. “Oils from algae hold significant potential as economically viable, low-emission transportation fuels and could become a critical new energy source,” says Emil Jacobs, vice president of research and development at Exxon Mobil. The oil company is investing $600 million (€420 million) in genetic entrepreneur Craig Venter’s firm Synthetic Genomics.

    (-> read original interview at SPIEGEL ONLINE international)

    The technology holds considerable promise. Indeed, whoever manages to be the first to sell ecologically sustainable and climate-neutral biofuel at competitive prices will not only rake in billions, but will also write history.

    Do-it-yourself diesel barons launched the biofuel industry decades ago when they used old French-fry grease to fuel modest agricultural machines. Today, hundreds of thousands of cars run on ethanol derived from grain. In the United States, for example, more than 40 percent of gasoline contains ethanol additive. The fuel is produced in huge fermenters the size of blimps, by fermenting a mash of corn or rye with yeast.

    But ethanol as a biofuel has a bad reputation. One hectare (2.47 acres) of corn produces less than 4,000 liters of ethanol a year, and 8,000 liters of water are required to produce a liter of ethanol. Besides, crops grown for ethanol take away valuable farmland for food production. The last growing season marked the first time US farmers harvested more corn for ethanol production than for use as animal feed. One of the adverse consequences of the biofuel boom is that it is driving up food prices.

    Astonishingly Productive

    For this reason, many environmentalists now believe that growing energy plants is the wrong approach. Algae, on the other hand, do not require any farmland. Sun, saltwater, a little fertilizer and carbon dioxide are all the undemanding little organisms need to thrive. And because they consume about as much CO2 during photosynthesis as is later released when the oil they produce is burned, algae-based fuels are also climate neutral.

    Algae are also astonishingly productive. A hectare of sunny desert covered with algae vats can yield almost eight times as much biofuel per unit of biomass in a year than corn grown for energy purposes.

    Sapphire is one of the pioneers of the industry. CEO Pyle has a vision of transforming desert areas into fertile, energy-producing land. “We have to grow algae like rice, in shallow patties of water on thousands of hectares,” he says. This, he says, is the only way to produce algae-based oil in large quantities and at competitive prices.

    Sapphire expects one barrel of its green petroleum to cost between $70 and $100 in the future, which is significantly cheaper than petroleum. However, as with grain production, this requires the use of high-performance varieties. According to Pyle, his company has optimized the yield, resistance to disease and “harvest capability” of the green algae it uses. Sapphire’s engineers are already testing their green miracle algae at a small plant in New Mexico. Together with Monsanto, which produces agricultural chemicals, and industrial gas company Linde, the algae makers plan to explore commercial opportunities at a 120-hectare site soon.

    ‘We Simply Have to Build It’

    But the Sapphire algae can only be a beginning, because they merely enrich the oil internally. To obtain the oil, the algae must be harvested and the oil extracted in a costly and complex process.

    To overcome this obstacle, other scienty way to produce algae-based oil in large quantities and at competitive prices.

    Sapphire expects one barrel of its green petroleum to cost between $70 and $100 in the future, which is significantly cheaper than petroleum. However, as with grain production, this requires the use of high-performance varieties. According to Pyle, his company has optimized the yield, resistance to disease and “harvest capability” of the green algae it uses. Sapphire’s engineers are already testing their green miracle algae at a small plant in New Mexico. Together with Monsanto, which produces agricultural chemicals, and industrial gas company Linde, the algae makers plan to explore commercial opportunities at a 120-hectare site soon.

    ‘We Simply Have to Build It’

    But the Sapphire algae can only be a beginning, because they merely enrich the oil internally. To obtain the oil, the algae must be harvested and the oil extracted in a costly and complex process.

    To overcome this obstacle, other scientists are developing algae that don’t even have to be harvested. Instead, they essentially ooze the fuel of the future. Evolution has not yielded anything that produces biofuel from CO2 on a large scale, explains biologist Venter, “which is why we simply have to build it.”

    The first of these miracle organisms can already be admired in the Joule laboratory. The bioengineers’ tools include culture mediums, incubators and, most importantly, databases containing the DNA sequences of thousands of microorganisms. Robertson and his team search the databases for promising gene fragments, which they then isolate and inject into the genetic material of blue algae.

    ‘You Could Put Our Product in Your Car’

    Dozens of varieties of the microorganisms, also known as cyanobacteria, bob up and down in bulbous beakers at Joule. A green brew fills small photobioreactors, which are used to test the blue algae under various environmental conditions. “Here we simulate for example the day-and-night rhythm of Texas,” says Robinson, explaining one of the experiments. The company has a pilot plant in Texas.

    The program is as complex as it is costly. Nevertheless, success appears to be proving the genetic engineers right. The microbiologists at Joule have created blue algae strains that pump so-called alkanes outward through their membranes. Alkanes are energy-rich hydrocarbons contained in diesel fuel. “You have to persuade the cell that it stops growing and makes the product of interest and does it continuously,” Robinson explains. In contrast to ethanol, the end product is not a low-quality fuel, but a highly pure product that contains no sulfur or benzene. “You could put our product in your car,” says Robinson.

    The laboratory algae are now doing their work in high-tech bioreactors, where carbon dioxide is constantly bubbling through shimmering green panels that look like solar collectors. Robertson’s ultimate goal is to derive about 140,000 liters of biofuel a year from one hectare of land — a yield 40 times as high as with corn grown for ethanol. Joule has bought about 500 hectares of desert land in New Mexico to build a first commercial plant.

    Large Amounts of CO2 Required

    But will the laboratory creations really work as well in open fields as they do in the lab? Calculations show that some algae plants will likely consume more fertilizer and energy per hectare than grain crops. And the carbon dioxide in the air won’t be enough to feed the microalgae. Scientists estimate that a commercial algae fuel plant would require about 10,000 cubic meters of CO2 a day. Whether and how large amounts of the gas could be derived from the exhaust gases of large coal power plants, for example, and then brought to the algae farms, remains unclear.

    The farms could also require enormous tracts of land. In a recent article in the journal Science, researchers at Wageningen University in the Netherlands calculated that, in theory, an area the size of Portugal would have to be filled with algae pools to satisfy Europe’s current fuel needs. A “leap in microalgae technology” is needed to at least triple productivity, say experts.

    Pyle and Robertson are convinced that this increase is possible. They insist that algae technology can be used to meet a significant portion of our energy requirements in the future. “There is certainly enough non-arable land with enough solar radiation and enough CO2 and water sourcing in the world,” says Robertson. Another important advantage, he adds, is that algae-based fuel could easily be pumped into the oil industry’s existing pipelines and refineries, and that cars and aircraft would not have to be modified to accommodate the biofuel.

    But even the pioneers admit that the switch to algae-based fuel will likely take a while longer. Sometimes completely mundane things still stand in the way of the green revolution.

    The algae growers at Sapphire, for example, face competition from little 10-legged creatures. “Shrimp think algae are good food,” says CEO Pyle. “If you don’t pay attention, you will ultimately have a shrimp farm.”

    Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan

    (-> read original interview at SPIEGEL ONLINE international)

  • Nathan Myhrvold: ‘Culinary History Has To Be Analyzed Like Art History’

    In a SPIEGEL interview, inventor and chef Nathan Myhrvold, the author of the new book “Modernist Cuisine,” discusses the deployment of laboratory equipment in the kitchen, the preparation of the perfect cheeseburger and the practice of hyperdecanting — using a blender to serve wine.

    SPIEGEL: Mr. Myhrvold, what is wrong with the ordinary French fry?

    Nathan Myhrvold: There is nothing wrong with it, but most French fries are just not perfect. They’re too greasy, they’re underdone, they’re not crispy. And most of them wind up being soggy.

    SPIEGEL: Definitely a culinary affront. Are you able to offer any help with your new scientific cookbook, “Modernist Cuisine”?

    Myhrvold: Yes, and this is a subject many people are obsessed with. The traditional technique is that you fry French fries twice — first at a lower temperature, then at higher temperature, letting them cool in-between. We decided to follow a totally different approach to create a French fry that was crisp on the outside, that had a very light fluffy texture on the inside and that would stay that way for some time. First, we steam the French fries so that they are basically cooked. Then we put them in an ultra-sonic bath …

    SPIEGEL: … an appliance that is normally used for cleaning jewelry or glasses?

    Myhrvold: Well, yes. It produces very high frequency soundwaves that cause tiny bubbles to form in water, which are so powerful that they can actually rip holes in aluminium foil in a process called cavitation. In the case of the French fries, it pokes little holes in their surface. That makes the exterior rough. If we now fry them, we get an extra crispy experience because of the extra surface area.

    SPIEGEL: Yum! And how long does it take to make them?

    Myhrvold: Two hours. But really, the extra time is the ultra-sonic bath. It sits in there for 45 minutes and you don’t have to care.

    (-> read original interview at SPIEGEL ONLINE international)

    SPIEGEL: Your new book, “Modernist Cuisine,” is a six volume, 2,400 page behemoth, which weighs 47 pounds (21 kilograms). It’s an encyclopaedic treatment of modern cooking techniques and recipes and costs $650 (€445). Who do you think is going to read something like that?

    Myhrvold: The book is for people who really love food, no matter if they are professionals, home cooks or even if they don’t cook themselves at all. I wanted to have a book that would explain cooking in a way I’d never seen a cookbook do before. And I wanted to take techniques that have been developed by great chefs around the world that are almost impossible to learn unless you go and work in those restaurants.

    SPIEGEL: The underlying theme of “Modernist Cuisine” is that we are witnessing a revolution in cooking. What does it entail?

    Myhrvold: The book is about pushing the boundaries of cooking using science and technology and laying the foundations for 21st-century cooking. Most of it has its roots in the mid-1980s, when people realized that science was important to cooking and that technology was relevant, too. My friend Ferran Adria of the restaurant El Bulli, in Spain, started very early on to experiment with these new techniques. My co-authors, Chris Young and Maxim Billet, and I document this revolution. And we did invent some new dishes and techniques.

    SPIEGEL: The book features, for example, recipes of faux eggs made with parmesan cheese, “caviar” made from melon and “cherries” made of foie gras. Is this sheer childish curiosity?

    Myhrvold: The new revolution in cooking can be viewed in two ways. One is that you can take any traditional food and apply modern techniques. In the book, for example, we have some very traditional American food, like maccaroni and cheese. They taste better but basically look the same. The other approach is to create food that is quite different than anything that has existed before. That’s what I call cooking in a modernist aesthetic. Let’s do a risotto made with pinenuts instead of rice, for example. Pinenuts are a traditional Italian ingredient, but they have never been used this way. By doing so, however, you make something that is delicous, fresh and new and that has an interesting culinary reference.

    SPIEGEL: You are a mathematician and a physicist. Does your enthusiasm for cooking stem from the fact that it is reminiscent of experimenting in a laboratory?

    Myhrvold: Food, like anything else, lives in the physical world and obeys the laws of physics. When you whisk together some oil and a little bit of lemon juice — or, in other words, make mayonnaise — you are using the principles of physics and chemistry. Understanding how those principles affect cooking lets you cook better. And I was fascinated by this very early on. When I was 9 years old, I announced to my mother I was going to cook Thanksgiving dinner …

    SPIEGEL: … which involves the roasting of a whole turkey …

    Myhrvold: … exactly, and so I went to the library, got Auguste Escoffiers classic “Le Guide Culinaire” and tried.

    SPIEGEL: How did you fare?

    Myhrvold: Well, I could do a lot better today, but I was enthusiastic and I was nine. After that, I read literally hundreds of cookbooks and was sort of a self-taught chef. Then, in the mid-1990s, I took a leave of absence from my job at Microsoft to go to chef’s school La Varenne, in France.

    SPIEGEL: In 1991, you were even on a winning team at the World Championship Barbecue Cooking Contest, in Memphis.

    Myhrvold: Yes. There is a long tradition of barbecuing in the southern United States. For “Modernist Cuisine,” we looked into this micro-regional cuisine and invented nine different barbecue sauces. We also looked at grilling. By doing a computer simulation, we discovered that, if you line the inside of your grill with aluminium foil, the cooking is much more even.

    SPIEGEL: How do you cook a steak medium rare to perfection the modern way?

    Myhrvold: First, we cook our meat. Then, we use an extremely hot grill or a torch to heat the outside and make it crispy. For cooking, you can use a steam oven or a combi-oven. However, the steak gets even better if you use the sous-vide cooking technique.

    SPIEGEL: … the method of cooking vacuum-sealed food very slowly in a water basin at comparably low temperatures …

    Myhrvold: Exactly. NASA, for example, used the method for food for space flight. The key thing is the control over temperature and cooking time. It is very carefree and very accurate in temperature, which means you get the precise results you were aiming for every single time. You also conserve the flavors.

    SPIEGEL: You also present what you describe as the ultimate cheeseburger recipe in the book. Please explain.

    Myhrvold: We have a philosophy that any dish can be made fantastic if you really care about it. So, if you want to make the ultimate cheeseburger, you better make your own bun, your own sauces and your own pattie. First, there is this special mix of meat, and we did a lot of experiments to find the right meat mixture. Then, we have a specific way of grinding it that aligns the grain. It’s simple to do and we feel it makes a real difference in how the hamburger tastes and what the texture is. Next, we cook the hamburger sous vide. Then we put it into liquid nitrogen for 30 seconds to a minute. Finally, we deep fry it. That’s even better than grilling.

    SPIEGEL: Can you describe the result?

    Myhrvold: The outside is very brown and crisp, the inside medium-rare in perfection. The bun and the lettuce and the other things have to contrast the flavor. That’s what you want. Some people make fun of the fact that it takes 30 hours to do. But if you care about hamburgers, here is the ultimate hamburger.

    SPIEGEL: To write “Modernist Cuisine,” you created a complete “Cooking lab” in a portion of a 20,000-square-foot (1,858-square-meter) warehouse outside Seattle that houses the research lab of your company, “Intellectual Ventures”. The Cooking lab is one of the most compelling kitchens in the world, with a load of industrial-type equipment. What, for example, is a Rotovap?

    Myhrvold: It’s a laboratory device for doing destillations. And there are a couple of cooking contexts where you want do that. There are many foods, for example, that have flavor compounds in them which you can distill. You can also use the device to make cognac, schnapps or whiskey. And we actually do quite the opposite: If you take a scotch whiskey and distill out the alcohol, what is left has an amazing taste to it and can be used as a flavoring for a dessert.

    SPIEGEL: The kitchen also features a 100-ton hydraulic press, for example, for beef jerky, and an autoclave, which — as far as I know — is designed to sterilize lab equipment. You call it “the pressure cooker from hell.”

    Myhrvold: Yes. And it does a great French onion soup! The onions for such a soup typically have to be brown. But that browning reaction is tricky. It’s very easy to burn the onion. Now, we take the onion, put it in a little bit of water and add a little bit of baking soda. After 30 minutes in the autoclave, we have perfect French onion soup.

    SPIEGEL: A spray dryer, freeze dryer, combi-oven and vacuum sealer — this isn’t exactly the stuff one would find in an everyday kitchen.

    Myhrvold: Well, many of these machines are made for laboratory use and are fairly expensive. But you don’t have to get all of them. If you are willing to buy a little bit of equipment, then you can cook 70 to 80 percent of the recipes in the book. The three most useful machines are the water bath for cooking sous vide, the centrifuge and the homogenizer.

    SPIEGEL: You really think people will do this at home?

    Myhrvold: Sure. And it makes a lot of things easier. Modern cooking techniques can achieve ideal results without the perfect timing or good luck that traditional methods demand. Take beurre blanc, for example …

    SPIEGEL: … which disintegrates quite easily if you don’t take utmost care.

    Myhrvold: Exactly. And we have a recipe for the invincible beurre blanc that you can make ahead of time, that you can even put in the refrigerator and heat up later. The recipe involves some emulsifiers that you don’t get in every grocery store, but you can usually find them on the Internet …

    SPIEGEL: For example?

    Myhrvold: Propylene glycol alginate, which is derived from a seaweed and originally comes from Japan. We use it for a lot of recipes. It’s great and easy to use.

    SPIEGEL: You also recommend putting wine in a blender for decanting. Are you serious?

    Myhrvold: Absolutely. It is called hyperdecanting …

    SPIEGEL: … which is probably a great way to freak the hell out of any wine-lover.

    Myhrvold: Completely. And thats half of the value. I did this with a friend of mine once who is a Spanish duke and who comes from one of the oldest wine-making families in Spain. When I hit the switch of the blender with his wine in there, I thought he is gonna pull a sword.

    SPIEGEL: How does it work?

    Myhrvold: Part of the goal of decanting is to have the gases that have dissolved in the wine come out of it. Another goal is to have oxygen come in. The traditional way is to pour the wine over a large part of the surface area of the decanter so that the exchange of gas is promoted. And so I said, hey, we can promote the exchange of gas even better with a blender in about 30 seconds. In blind tests, most people find this to be an improvement, particular for a young red wine, such as an ’82 Margaux.

    SPIEGEL: To make “Modernist Cuisine” even more compelling, you went to great lengths in illustrating the book. Heavy machinery was used to bisect a whole kitchen?

    Myhrvold: We have two-halfs of one of the best kitchens in the world. We cut a microwave in half, a grill, a wok and even a $5,000 restaurant oven. Early in the book project, I hit upon this idea of doing cutaway photos, where we would show the magic view of what’s happening inside your food while it cooks. You see the glowing coals and the fat flaring up from the burgers, and the burgers themselves are cut in half so you can see what happens is as the heat progresses through.

    SPIEGEL: Was it worth the effort?

    Myhrvold: Well, you tell me. Our goal was to show people food as they have never seen it before. To achieve that, we actually made a hell of a mess. For example, we discovered why people don’t cut their woks in half. Our wok caught fire three times, because the oil from the wok would get right into the flame of the burner and then, whoosh. And we had to clean up and start again. But, in the end, we got the shot. And the shot, I think, shows you all the things that go on during stir frying, because stir frying is a combination of tossing things in the air, having super high heat from below and so forth.

    SPIEGEL: You seem to enjoy questioning traditions of cooking and reinventing methods and technologies. Is cooking an ever-changing subject, maybe even comparable to art or theater?

    Myhrvold: Absolutely. Culinary history has to be analyzed in a similar way to art history. Ferran Adria or Heston Blumenthal, chef of the restaurant Fat Duck, near London, are the modernists of cooking. They create wonderful experiences, comparable to an opera or a Broadway play in New York. I think that there is a role for food to be art; and when food is art, it can have drama, it can have spectacle, it can be theatrical. It can be this amazing experience. That’s what they are aiming to do.

    SPIEGEL: Mr. Myhrvold, we thank you for this interview.

    Interview conducted by Philip Bethge

    (-> read original interview at SPIEGEL ONLINE international)

  • Jonathan Schell: ‘Our Illusion Is that We Can Control Nuclear Energy’

    In a SPIEGEL interview, peace activist and author Jonathan Schell discusses the lessons of the Fukushima disaster, mankind’s false impression that it can somehow safely produce electricity from the atom, and why he thinks the partial meltdown in Japan could mark a turning point for the world.

    SPIEGEL: Mr. Schell, what unsettled you the most about the Fukushima nuclear catastrophe?

    Schell: Clearly this whole accident just went completely off the charts of what had been prepared for. If you look at the manuals for dealing with nuclear safety accidents, you’re not going to find a section that says muster your military helicopters, dip buckets into the sea and then try as best you can to splash water onto the reactor and see if you can hit a spent fuel pool. There’s going to be no instruction saying, go and get your riot control trucks to spray the reactor, only to find that you’re driven back by radiation. The potential for total disaster was clearly demonstrated.

    SPIEGEL: But supporters of nuclear energy are already preparing a different narrative. They say that an old, outdated nuclear power plant was hit by a monster tsunami and an earthquake at the same time — and, yet, so far only a handful of people have been exposed to radioactive energy. Not a single person has died.

    Schell: Clearly it’s better than if you had had a massive Chernobyl-type release of energy. But I think that any reasonable analysis will show that this was not a power plant that was under control. The operators were thrown back on wild improvisation. The worst sort of disaster was a desperate mistake or two away. Through a bunch of workarounds and frantic fixes, technicians at Fukushima headed that off, but that was no sure thing. No one will be able honestly to portray this event as a model of nuclear safety. It would be like saying that the Cuban missile crisis showed the safety of nuclear arsenals.

    SPIEGEL: It is not just in Germany, but also in the United States and China that people are stockpiling supplies of iodine tablets. And shipments from Japan are supposed to be tested for radioactivity. Where does this profound fear of nuclear energy come from?

    Schell: In the public mind, nuclear power is associated with nuclear weapons. In both, a nuclear chain reaction is, in fact, the source of power. It’s true that you can’t have an atomic explosion in a nuclear power plant, but people are quite right to make that association. For example there is also the proliferation connection. In other words, the problem with the association of nuclear power with nuclear weapons goes beyond the escape of radiation and Chernobyl-type accidents. The third big challenge is, of course, the waste problem. You have to keep that waste underground for maybe a half-million years. So we’re acting in a kind of cosmic way in the terrestrial setting, even though we just don’t have the wisdom and staying power to do so.

    SPIEGEL: You say that dealing with nuclear energy is like gambling with “Mother Nature’s power.” Why is it so totally different from other sources of energy?

    Schell: Because it’s so colossally more powerful. Comparable energy can be found, at best, in the center of stars. It’s basically not found on earth naturally, and it’s only through our own scientific brilliance that we’ve been able to introduce it into the terrestrial setting. But, unfortunately, we’re not as advanced morally, practically and politically as we are scientifically, so we are not prepared to control this force properly. The most dangerous illusion we have concerning nuclear energy is that we can control it.

    (-> read original article at SPIEGEL ONLINE international)

    SPIEGEL: Despite all these concerns, we have seen an emerging renaissance in nuclear energy in recent years.

    Schell: I don’t think there really was a nuclear renaissance. There was the phrase “nuclear renaissance,” but already in many parts of the world the financial aspects of nuclear power were not working out. The bankers were not stepping forward to finance new power plants. Insurance companies were reluctant to cover the risk.

    SPIEGEL: Many environmentalists are now even calling for an expansion of nuclear power — because they see it as the only way to limit climate change.

    Schell: I find their arguments weak. In the first place, there are about 450 nuclear power plants around the world. To make a serious dent in carbon emissions, you would have to double or triple that –and not only in countries as technically sophisticated as Japan. More importantly, I fear the attempted solution would be self-defeating in its own terms. Think how the high the cost will be if we pour our scarce resources into this faulty one and then there is a truly catastrophic accident down the road, and we were forced by this to liquidate the investment. This would be not only a disaster in its own right, but a disaster for the overall effort to head off global warming.

    SPIEGEL: German Chancellor Angela Merkel had always been a supporter of nuclear energy. Now she is talking about expediting Germany’s planned phase-out of nuclear power. Will Germany be able to succeed in eschewing nuclear power entirely?

    Schell: The anti-nuclear movement certainly has been stronger in Germany than in practically any other country, even before the Fukushima incident. I’d say it looks quite possible that Germany will go back to the phase-out policy, and that its nuclear power plants will be taken offline quickly. And I’d be surprised if Japan did not go in the same direction.

    SPIEGEL: Why don’t we see similar anti-nuclear protests in the United States?

    Schell: The whole nuclear industry has had a low profile in the United States, perhaps, in part, because we haven’t seen the construction of new power plants since the Three Mile Island accident in 1979.

    SPIEGEL: But President Barack Obama has now announced the construction of new nuclear power plants.

    Schell: … and people in the US don’t seem to be bothered by it so far. That’s been true, until now. New polls show that support for nuclear power has dropped sharply. Honestly, I don’t think Americans have been thinking about this issue very much. Now the Fukushima accident will concentrate people’s minds.

    SPIEGEL: Will Obama abandon his pro-nuclear energy policies?

    Schell: There’s a real chance that, in practice, he will back off — also for budgetary reasons. If you try to add in all kinds of new safety features, then you raise the price. The cost of building a nuclear power plant today already costs tens of billions of dollars.

    SPIEGEL: The greatest enthusiasm to be found anywhere once permeated the US shortly after the discovery of nuclear energy. During the 1950s, the Eisenhower administration enthusiastically promoted its “Atoms for Peace” program.

    Schell: That story is interesting because with President Dwight D. Eisenhower, we see the close connection at every stage of nuclear power with nuclear weapons. Eisenhower increased the US arsenal from around 1,400 to 20,000 nuclear weapons. But he also wanted an element of peace in his policy. This is where the “Atoms for Peace” program came in, whereby countries would be given technology to produce nuclear power, the “friendly atom,” in exchange for constraints on proliferation of nuclear weapons — the “destructive atom.” That rationale is still embodied today in the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

    SPIEGEL: Obama has outlined his vision of a world without nuclear weapons. But the reaction to it has been lukewarm, even within his own team.

    Schell: Within the Obama administration, it seems to be the president himself — and possibly even the president alone — who really believes in this vision. But he has the public on his side. If you ask people if they would like to live in a world without nuclear weapons, a very high majority answer in the affirmative. On the other hand, there is a powerful bureaucratic infrastructure left in the Pentagon, in the State Department, in the Energy Department that is not ready to translate Obama’s vision into action and works to thwart it. He needs more supporters among his own officials.

    World Destruction Is Less Likely Today, But ‘Technically’ Possible

    SPIEGEL: Is a world without nuclear weapons even a realistic vision? With the technology already out there, wasn’t the genie permanently released from the bottle with Hiroshima in 1945?

    Schell: There will never be a world that is not nuclear capable. Once that knowledge was acquired, it could never be lost. So the art of living without nuclear weapons is an art of living without them, but with the knowledge of how to make them. The classic argument against a nuclear weapons-free world is that somebody will make use of that residual knowledge, build a nuclear weapon and start giving orders to a defenseless world. But what I point out is that other countries would also have that knowledge and they could, in very short order, be able to return to nuclear armament. Therefore, the imbalance is much more temporary than it first seems.

    SPIEGEL: Is the outlawing of nuclear weapons possible without also abolishing nuclear energy as well?

    Schell: A nuclear weapons-free world should be one in which nuclear technology is under the strictest possible control. But strict control of all nuclear technology is, of course, far more difficult as long as you continue to have nuclear energy production, as long as uranium continues to be enriched and as long plutonium is still being made somewhere.

    SPIEGEL: How serious do you think the current threat is of nuclear technology falling into the wrong hands?

    Schell: It is extremely real. The two most active hot spots for nuclear proliferation right now are Iran and North Korea. But you also have many other countries that are suddenly showing a renewed interest in nuclear power. The transfer of the technology in the Middle East, especially, is becoming a real danger. We may have fewer nuclear weapons, but we have more fingers on the button.

    SPIEGEL: Does that make the world today more dangerous than it was during the Cold War?

    Schell: No. I have too lively a memory of the Cuban missile crisis in the middle of the Cold War, which really looked like the potential end of the world. Regardless, it is true to say that the nature of the danger has changed.

    SPIEGEL: So the elimination of humanity through nuclear weapons is still a concrete possibility?

    Schell: Technically, the option is still there. What’s harder, though, is to frame scenarios in which all of the weapons would be fired simultaneously. Clearly, this is not as likely as it was during the Cold War. There are other colossal risks associated with lesser uses of nuclear weapons, though, ones that we are just becoming aware of. For instance, we have learned that the ecological perils of nuclear warfare can be triggered by much smaller numbers of weapons. There’s a new study showing that the use of just 100 or 150 nuclear weapons in a conflict between Pakistan and India would cause a nuclear winter through the burning of cities and the lofting of soot into the atmosphere. That would produce global famine.

    SPIEGEL: How great a threat do you think there is of nuclear weapons falling into the hands of terrorists?

    Schell: Over the long term, it’s clear that this danger is rising. It’s just in the nature of scientific knowledge and technology to become more and more available as time passes. The moment must come when it passes beyond the control of states alone and into the hands of lesser groupings.

    SPIEGEL: To what extent are nuclear power plants protected against terrorist attacks?

    Schell: So far, few adequate security precautions have been taken to mitigate the potential consequences. The nuclear energy industry has succeeded with its argument that such measures would simply be too costly.

    SPIEGEL: Does the example of the events in Japan show that human beings are incapable of learning from history? After all, the country is one that has experienced the horror of nuclear bombs first hand and nevertheless decided to rely on atomic energy.

    Schell: Kenzaburo Oe, the recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature, said that going ahead with nuclear power in Japan is a betrayal of the victims of Hiroshima. But perhaps Fukushima will be a turning point — not just for Japan, but for the rest of the world as well.

    SPIEGEL: Mr. Schell, we thank you for this interview.

    Interview conducted by Philip Bethge and Gregor Peter Schmitz

    (-> read original article at SPIEGEL ONLINE international)

     

  • Japan’s Chernobyl: Fukushima Marks the End of the Nuclear Era

    Japan was still reeling from its largest recorded earthquake when an explosion struck the Fukushima nuclear plant on Saturday, followed by a second blast on Monday. Despite government assurances, there are fears of another Chernobyl. The incident has sparked a heated political debate in Germany and looks likely to end the dream of cheap and safe nuclear power. By SPIEGEL Staff.

    Japanese television brought the catastrophe into millions of living rooms throughout the country, where viewers watched in horror as an explosion struck a nuclear reactor in Fukushima.

    The explosion on Saturday blew off the roof of the reactor building, sending a cloud of thick white smoke into the air. When the smoke had dissipated, only three of what had been four white reactor buildings were still visible.

    Nothing but a ghostly shell remained of the fourth building.

    The outside walls of the reactor 1 building had burst. The steel shell that contains the red-hot fuel rods apparently withstood the explosion, but it was unclear if a major disaster could still be averted. In addition, four other reactors in Fukushima’s two power plant complexes were not fully under control.

    Second Explosion

    Then, on Monday, a second explosion hit the Fukushima Daiichi plant, this time involving the facility’s reactor 3. The blast injured 11 workers and sent a huge column of smoke into the air. It was unclear if radiation leaked during that explosion, which was apparently caused by a build up of hydrogen, with the plant’s operator saying that radiation levels at the reactor were still below legal limits. The US reacted to Monday’s explosion by moving one of its aircraft carriers, which was 100 miles (160 kilometers) offshore, away from the area, following the detection of low-level radiation in its vicinity.

    Shortly afterwards, the government announced that the cooling system for the plant’s reactor 2 had also failed. The explosions at reactors 1 and 3 had been preceded by similar breakdowns. The Jiji news agency reported on Monday that water levels at reactor 2 had fallen far enough to partially expose fuel rods.

    The television images on the weekend left no doubt: The highly advanced island nation had apparently experienced the worst nuclear catastrophe to date in the 21st century, triggered by the worst earthquake in Japanese history.

    A short time after Saturday’s blast, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano appeared on the main TV channel and spoke about the accident — in the manner of a teacher telling students during a class trip what they are going to do next. Then a grey-haired expert on nuclear power plants joined Edano and appealed to the population to remain “reisei,” to stay calm and cool.

    Reisei, reisei: It was as if the government was more concerned about cooling down the heads of Japanese citizens than the partially melted nuclear fuel rods. …..

    (-> read original article at SPIEGEL ONLINE international)

  • Ditching Cars for Bullet Trains: Can Obama Get High-Speed on Track?

    President Barack Obama wants to upgrade America’s transport system using high-speed trains, bringing a taste of what is a part of everyday life in Europe and Asia to the United States. But the car-obsessed nation is divided over the plans. Is the mammoth project doomed to failure?

    US Vice-President Joseph Biden is America’s most famous commuter. It has earned him the nickname “Amtrak Joe.” Several times a week, Biden takes an Amtrak train from Wilmington, Delaware to the historic Union Station in Washington, DC. It has been claimed the Democrat now knows the first name of every ticket inspector on the line.

    Biden must have been pleased when he unveiled the government’s new high-speed rail plans at 30th Street Station in Philadelphia last month. The administration plans to spend $53 billion (€38 billion) on passenger trains and rail networks over the next six years. The lion’s share of this has been earmarked for new high-speed connections. The aim is that 80 percent of Americans will have access to “bullet trains” by 2035.

    Such gleaming high-tech marvels could race between San Francisco and Los Angeles at speeds of up to 350 kilometers per hour (220 miles per hour). The planners hope to cut the journey times between Washington and Boston to less than four hours. A T-shaped line in Texas would connect Dallas, Houston and San Antonio. The plan foresees raising hundreds of kilometers of this so-called “Texas T-Bone” off the ground so that longhorn cattle can pass underneath the rails.

    (-> read original article at SPIEGEL ONLINE international)

    “It’s a smart investment in the quality of life for all Americans,” says Rick Harnish of the Chicago-based Midwest High Speed Rail Association. Industry insiders like Ansgar Brockmeyer, of the passenger rail division of Germany’s Siemens Mobility, are thrilled about this locomotive renaissance. “There’s reason for optimism,” he says.

    However, the country’s conservative forces are determined to derail US President Barack Obama’s technological vision. No fewer than three newly elected governors (from the states of Wisconsin, Florida, and Ohio) have completely rejected Washington’s planned cash injection for the country’s railways.

    America’s Legendary Railroads

    In fact it’s difficult to say whether America’s long-neglected trains can ever make a comeback. Large parts of the network are in a desperate state, and most Americans have long-since switched to traveling by car or plane instead.

    And yet the railroad enabled their forefathers to open up the Wild West. Train services were profitable in the US right up until the 1950s. Many lines were legendary, such as the Santa Fe Super Chief, which brought its passengers from Chicago to Los Angeles in luxury. Film stars like Elizabeth Taylor, Lauren Bacall and Humphrey Bogart slumbered in the elegant sleeper cars, and dined in five-star style.

    The California Zephyr is another classic service, with its route stretching for almost 4,000 kilometers (2,500 miles) from the Midwest to San Francisco. In better times, “Vista dome” cars gave passengers a 360-degree panoramic view of the Colorado River, Rocky Mountains and Sierra Nevada. An elite team of hostesses, dubbed the “Zephyrettes,” served drinks and even offered to act as babysitters.

    The Zephyr still runs to this day — but the 51-hour journey makes this more of a treat for diehard railway fans. One such fan is James McCommons from Northern Michigan University. The academic spent a year crisscrossing the US by train before chronicling his experiences in a book. “It’s embarrassing,” he says. “We were the greatest railroad nation in the world, and now we don’t even build a railroad car in this country ourselves.”

    American author James Kunstler complains that “Amtrak has become the laughing stock of the world.” He jokes that the company was clearly “created on a Soviet-management model, with an extra overlay of Murphy’s Law to ensure maximum entropy of service.” Indeed, Amtrak trains currently take more than 11 hours to cover the 600 kilometers (375 miles) from San Francisco to Los Angeles. It hardly helps either that the train is called the “Coast Starlight.”

    A Wake-Up Call

    The high-speed rail plans have therefore come as something of a wake-up call in these circumspect times. Many Americans are amazed to discover that President Obama appears to be serious about investing heavily in the railways. “I don’t know what this fascination with trains is about,” says Michael Sanera of the John Locke Foundation, a free-market think tank. He has only one explanation: “I think there is a lot of frustration primarily by men who maybe didn’t get that train set when they were kids, and now they want to play around with trains.”

    Taking a closer look, it’s easy to see how serious the situation has become. America is facing gridlock. According to a study by the National Surface Transportation Policy and Revenue Commission, the US will need nine new airports the size of the gigantic Denver International Airport and will have to double the number of miles of interstate highways if demand for transportation continues to grow at the current level in the coming decades. In 2009, commuters in the US spent 5 billion hours stuck in traffic jams. That’s seven times as long as in 1982.

    “Four decades from now, the United States will be home to 100 million additional people,” warns US Transport Secretary Ray LaHood. “If we settle for roads, bridges and airports that already are overburdened and insufficient … our next generation will find America’s arteries of commerce impassable.” He considers high-speed trains essential.

    Germany’s Siemens Hopes for New Business

    Rail experts in the US have identified about 10 corridors along which high-speed trains could theoretically run profitably. The most promising of these routes lies in the northeastern part of the country; namely between New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore and Washington, DC. Because the distances are relatively short and there is high demand, bullet trains could capitalize on their advantages in the region.

    There is also a relatively urgent need for rail connections in the Midwest, for example between Chicago and St. Louis. Although flights between the two cities take just over an hour, Harnish says that delays like check-in and security can easily turn that trip into three hours. By contrast, a high-speed rail line could cover this distance in less than two. Planners believe the route could serve as many as a million passengers a year.

    “In Europe we have seen that high-speed rail connections of under four hours can be competitive,” says Ansgar Brockmeyer from Siemens. The high-speed line between Barcelona and Madrid, which began operating at the start of 2008, has reportedly already captured half of the market share previously held by air travel. As early as 2006, Siemens-made Velaro trains were hurtling down the line at speeds in excess of 400 kilometers per hour (250 miles per hour).

    Siemens now hopes to be able to market the same model of trains in the US. Californians are renowned for being environmentally conscious and tech-savvy — even Arnold Schwarzenegger promoted high-speed trains in California when he was the state’s governor. All this has created favorable conditions for the California High Speed Rail Authority (CaHSRA), which wants to lay 1,300 kilometers of high-speed track, connecting more than 25 cities in the process. Work is due to get underway on a 100-kilometer stretch of the new line in 2012.

    “Our travel time from Los Angeles to San Francisco is going to be two hours and 40 minutes, with stops,” says Rachel Wall of the CaHSRA. “Anyone who has traveled that route knows that driving or flying takes longer.”

    Too Expensive and Too Risky

    Until recently, the industry also had high hopes in Florida. The railway industry expected a call for tenders before the end of the year for the construction of a line between Tampa and Orlando. This could potentially have created thousands of jobs. However, Governor Rick Scott killed the project. Too expensive and too risky is how the Republican governor summarized it, although he has since promised to reconsider his decision.

    A lot is at stake for President Obama. The bullet trains were part of his 2008 election campaign. More recently, he promoted rail projects in his latest State of the Union speech. The president fears the country could fall behind its rivals. China, for instance, plans to lay a jaw-dropping 13,000 kilometers of high-speed rail track by 2020. It’s investing the equivalent of more than $300 billion in this Herculean task.

    Beijing recently sacked Rail Minister Liu Zhijun after what were rumored to be allegations of corruption. The concrete beds of the tracks were apparently laid sloppily.

    But this has done little to dampen enthusiasm for the program. From 2012 onward, trains should be able to catapult passengers from Beijing to Shanghai in less than five hours. Amtrak trains currently cover a similar distance between New York and Atlanta in a decidedly pedestrian 18 hours.

    Rail fan McCommons blames American attitudes for the perilous state of his country’s railway systems. “We have been sold this bizarre idea that only automobiles and air can take care of all our needs,” he says. That’s hardly surprising since two generations of Americans have grown up almost entirely without passenger trains. “It’s not in their imagination to take a train,” he explains.

    Vice President Biden can therefore still consider himself a pioneer if he travels to work by train. He often takes the Acela Express to Washington, the only rail line in the US that’s trumpeted as being high-speed.

    Biden’s ride covers the almost 180-kilometer route from Wilmington to Washington in 75 minutes. The average speed: About 140 kilometers per hour.

    Translated from the German by Jan Liebelt

    (-> read original article at SPIEGEL ONLINE international)

  • Technology Pioneer David Gelernter: ‘Love Is Beyond Watson’

    What does Watson’s Jeopardy victory tell us? Not much, says David Gelernter, the computer science pioneer and Yale professor. SPIEGEL spoke with Gelernter about the prospects of achieveing artifically-created consciousness and the belief that eternal life can be secured on a hard drive.

    SPIEGEL: Dr. Gelernter, the American journalist Ambrose Bierce described the word we are looking for as “a temporary insanity curable by marriage.” Do you know what we mean?

    Gelernter: I don’t.

    SPIEGEL: It’s love. It’s a question from the TV show Jeopardy, and the IBM supercomputer Watson had no problem finding the solution. So does that mean Watson knows what love is?

    Gelernter: He doesn’t have the vaguest idea. The field of artificial intelligence has not even started to address how emotions are represented cognitively, what makes a belief and so forth. The problem is, I don’t think only with my mind. I think with my body and my mind together. There’s no such thing as love without bodily input, output, reaction and response. So love is beyond Watson.

    SPIEGEL: Why, then, is Watson still doing well at Jeopardy?

    Gelernter: Because the body is not involved in playing Jeopardy. You don’t have to mean or to believe a single thing you say. The game is superficial enough to be winnable by an entity with no emotions, no sensations, and no self.

    SPIEGEL: Still, Watson’s opponents, Jeopardy all-time champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter, said in interviews that they had the feeling they were playing against a human. How come we can even consider Watson being on a par with us?

    Gelernter: I even consider my macaw Ike to be on a par with me (laughs and points to his macaw). But seriously, I’d rather chat with Watson than with some of the people in my department at Yale. Any baby with a teddy bear immediately anthropomorphizes the teddy bear. We want to see images of ourselves, mirrors of ourselves. Anthropomorphizing is a powerful human urge. So I have no problems calling Watson a “he.” That’s a normal human response.

    (-> read original article at SPIEGEL ONLINE international)

    SPIEGEL: Watson defeated Jennings and Rutter in the competition recently with staggering ease. If not human-like, can Watson at least tell us something about the human mind?

    Gelernter: Watson was not built to study the human mind. And the IBM people don’t claim that they’ve solved any cognitive problems. Watson was built to win Jeopardy. That’s it. For that purpose, it is drawing heavy on the parallel programming strategy. This strategy explicitly says: forget about the brain. The question is, can we burn raw computing power in such a way that we can create something that’s able to compete with a human? The result is an extraordinary piece of technology that — unlike IBM’s chess computer Deep Blue — has major implications for applied artificial intelligence.

    Computers Don’t Know What Pain Is

    SPIEGEL: But could you bring yourself to call a machine like that “intelligent”?

    Gelernter: The question is how superficial you are willing to be with your definition of “intelligence.” When we think of it seriously, intelligence implies a self who is intelligent, an entity that can sense its thoughts, is aware of the fact that it’s thinking and that it is manifesting intelligence. None of that is part of Watson by design.

    SPIEGEL: But let’s assume that we start feeding Watson with poetry instead of encyclopedias. In a few years time it might even be able to talk about emotions. Wouldn’t that be a step on the way to at least showing human-like behavior?

    Gelernter: Yes. However, the gulf between human-like behavior and human behavior is gigantic. Feeding poetry into Watson as opposed to encyclopedias is not going to do any good. Feed him Keats, and he will read “My heart aches, and a drowsing numbness pains my senses.” What the hell is that supposed to mean? When a poet writes “my heart aches” it’s an image, but it originates in an actual physical feeling. You feel something in the center of your chest. Or take “a drowsing numbness pains my senses”: Watson can’t know what drowsy means because he’s never fallen asleep. He doesn’t know what pain is. He has no purchase on poetry at all. Still, he could win at Jeopardy if the category were English Romantic poets. He would probably even do much better than most human contestants at not only saying Keats wrote this but explaining the references. There’s a lot of data involved in any kind of scholarship or assertion, which a machine can do very well. But it’s a fake.

    SPIEGEL: What is so special about the human brain that the machine can’t replicate it?

    Gelernter: The brain is radically different from the machine. Physics and chemistry are fundamental to its activity. The brain moves signals from one neuron to another by using a number of different neurotransmitters. It is made out of cells with certain properties, built out of certain proteins. It is a very elaborate piece of biology. The computer on the other hand is a purely electronic machine made out of semiconductors and other odds and ends. I can’t replicate the brain on a chip just in the same way I can’t replicate orange juice on a chip. Orange juice is just not the same thing as a chip.

    SPIEGEL: Are you serious about your statement that a machine won’t truly be able to think until it can daydream and hallucinate?

    Gelernter: Absolutely. We go through an oscillation between different mental states several times during the day, and you can’t understand the mind without understanding this spectrum. We have wide-awakeness, high energy, high level of concentration, which is associated with analytical capacities. And at the other end of the spectrum, we are exhausted, our thoughts are drifting. In that state, our thoughts are arranged in a different way. We start to freely associate. Take Rilke: All of a sudden it occurred to him that the flight of a swallow in the twilight sky is like a crack in a teapot. It’s a very strange image but a very striking image. Certainly, nobody else ever said it before. These sorts of new analogies and new images give rise to creativity, but also to scientific insights. Emotion has a lot to do with it. Why do you combine a bird flying with a piece of ceramic with a crack? Because, at least in Rilke’s mind, they are tagged with a similar emotion.

    SPIEGEL: But we are certainly able to think without getting so poetic.

    Gelernter: True. At the upper end of the spectrum, when my thoughts are disciplined by the logical rules of induction, analogies play no part. I have hypotheses, and I work my way through to conclusions. That kind of intelligence doesn’t need emotions, and it doesn’t need a body. But it is also of almost no importance to human beings. We think purely logically, analytically, roughly zero percent of our time. However, when I am thinking creatively, when I am inventing new analogies, I can’t do that without my emotional faculty. The body is intensely involved; it created the fuel that drives that process by engendering emotions.

    SPIEGEL: But even Watson might soon be able to come up with interesting analogies. Just give him the right books to read.

    Gelernter: It’s possible to build a machine that is capable of what seems like creativity — even a machine that can hallucinate. But it wouldn’t be like us at all. It would always be a fake, a facade. So, it is perfectly plausible that “Watson 2050” will win some poetry contests. It might write a magnificent sonnet that I find beautiful and moving and that becomes famous all over the world. But does that mean that Watson has a mind, a sense of self? No, of course not. There is nobody at home.

    SPIEGEL: Can you be sure?

    Gelernter: There is nothing inside.

    SPIEGEL: How can you know, then, that somebody is at home within another human being?

    Gelernter: I know what I am. I am a human being. If you are a human being too, my belief is you are intelligent. And not because you passed a test, not because you showed me you can do calculus or translate Latin. You could be fast asleep, somebody could ask, “Is he intelligent?” And I will say, “Yes, of course. He’s a human being.” The only intelligence everyone has ever experienced firsthand is his own. There is no objective test for intelligence in others. The observable behavior tells you nothing about what is within. The only way we can confidently ascribe intelligence is by seeing a creature like us.

    “Scientists Will Never Reproduce a Human Mind”

    SPIEGEL: There is a lab in Lausanne, Switzerland, where a group of scientists are trying to recreate the brain’s biology in each and every detail, one neuron at a time, in a supercomputer. They hope to replicate a complete human brain within a decade. Wouldn’t that be “a creature like us”?

    Gelernter: They could produce a very accurate brain simulator. They may be able to predict the behavior of the brain down to the transmission of signals. But they’re not going to produce a mind any more than a hurricane simulator produces a hurricane.

    SPIEGEL: Other scientists are far more optimistic. Regardless of all the obstacles, they say, the exponentially growing number of transistors on a chip will provide us with virtually infinite possibilities. If we connect huge numbers of computer chips in the right way and give them the right tasks to perform, then at some point consciousness will emerge.

    Gelernter: It is impossible to create mental states by writing software — no matter how sophisticated it gets. If a simple computer can’t produce orange juice, a much more complicated computer won’t do any better. Computer chips are just the wrong substrate, the wrong stuff for consciousness. Now, can some kind of a miracle happen if you put a lot of them together? Maybe. But I have no reason to believe that such a miracle will happen.

    SPIEGEL: Given that we can manage a really good fake, a robot that pretends to be conscious in a convincing way — would we even notice if it wasn’t the real thing?

    Gelernter: It already makes no difference to us. Just take the robots in Iraq and Afghanistan where they search for mines and so forth. The men on the front lines become emotionally attached to their robots, they’re sad when they are destroyed. And 50 years from now, robots will be much better. There are a lot of lonely people in the world. So now they have a robot, and it is around all the time, chats with them. Sure they will be attached to it. The robot will know all about them. The robot will be able to say things like, “How are you feeling this morning? I realize your back was hurting yesterday.” Will people have human-type feelings towards the robots? Absolutely. And then the question becomes: Does it matter that, in this sense, they are being defrauded? The answer is, given the scarcity of companionship in the world, it probably doesn’t matter in practical terms. However, it certainly matters philosophically. If you care about what it is to be a human being, the robot is not going to tell you.

    SPIEGEL: Things might change if you give him a near-perfect body, equipped with sensors that help him feel things and explore his environment like humans do.

    Gelernter: In that case the machine would be capable of simulating humanness much more effectively. But a fake body attached to a computer is still not going to generate real sensations. If you knocked your foot on something, your brain registers what we call pain. If you think of something good that is going to happen tomorrow, the body responds by feeling good, then the mind feels better and so forth. This feedback loop is very important to human behavior. A fake body, however, is still just binary switches with voltage levels going up and down.

    SPIEGEL: The American computer scientist Ray Kurzweil argues that the Internet itself might be on the brink of becoming super-intelligent, just because it will have computing power beyond imagination. And his beliefs are gaining in popularity. Why are these ideas so attractive?

    Gelernter: Because creating the mind is the philosopher’s stone of the Digital Age. In the Middle Ages, the alchemists tried to produce gold. Now they’ve moved over to the mind. Don’t get me wrong: They are going to produce a lot of interesting science along the way. But they are not going to get a mind.

    If You’re Dead, You’re Dead

    SPIEGEL: The so-called Singularity Movement predicts the advance of highly intelligent machines that will one day perhaps even become part of our bodies.

    Gelernter: We are being offered more ways than ever to destroy humanity by negating the significance of humanness. In the science fiction community there are those who say, “I will live forever insofar as I will be able to take my entire mind state and upload it to some server, and then I can die, but it doesn’t matter if my mind stays there.” Now, any two-year-old child can see the flaw in this argument: When you die, you are dead, and it doesn’t matter if there is one copy or a billion copies of what your mind was before you died. It doesn’t matter to you. You’re still dead. The great philosophical analogy of the second half of the 20th century was that mind is to brain the way software is to computer. But this is ridiculous. There is no analogy between mind and software.

    SPIEGEL: Why not?

    Gelernter: If you have some software, you can make as many copies as you like. You can put it on a million different computers, and it is always exactly the same software. Minds, however, run on exactly one platform. You can’t swap the mind out to some storage medium and then run it again after keeping it offline.

    SPIEGEL: Hypothetically, what would happen if you managed to transfer one person’s brain into another person’s body?

    Gelernter: There would be no mind anymore. As you took the brain from somebody and put it into somebody else’s head, the mind that you used to have is gone because that mind was part of a body and responsive to that body. From a medical standpoint, the question is if the brain is a flexible enough organism to re-tune itself to a different kind of input from a different body. But the original mind would definitely be lost.

    SPIEGEL: Assuming those popular visions of Artificial Intelligence won’t come true in the foreseeable future, where do you see AI research going in the next decade?

    Gelernter: My hope is that the philosophy of mind and cognitive science will develop a very sophisticated theory of how the mind works. The philosophy of mind has been dazzled by computing, which led down the wrong path. We have to get rid of this ridiculous obsession with computing, which has done tremendous damage. People worrying about singularity should go back and read Nietzsche. They should try and understand Kafka seriously. They should read a poet like William Wordsworth. Now, in an entirely separate effort, Artificial Intelligence will produce more and more powerful machines. We’ll rely on them heavily. They will fix problems and answer questions for us all the time. No one will claim that they have minds, least of all the people who built the programs.

    SPIEGEL: One of those powerful assistants might well be a descendent of Watson. Let’s assume it has been shrunken to the size of a pea, and it could be plugged into our brains. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to have all that knowledge on hand within your own body?

    Gelernter: I can have all of Watson’s knowledge available already — by just opening my laptop. Does it matter to me if I can get the answer not in 10 seconds but in 10 microseconds? It really depends on how I define my integrity as a human being. Could I get more direct access to a million completely meaningless disconnected facts if I implanted a Watson chip and then go onto Jeopardy? I would win Jeopardy. However, it would give me no happiness, no satisfaction, no feeling of triumph, no feeling of accomplishment.

    SPIEGEL: You wouldn’t feel tempted to get yourself a Watson?

    Gelernter: Sure I would. This is a brilliant, exciting piece of technology. I don’t want to take anything away from it. It puts AI on a track that is going to produce fascinating technology. It uses exactly what we are rich in, namely pure primitive computer power, to produce sophisticated answers to complex questions. We need that ability, and Watson can do it.

    SPIEGEL: Would you trade your macaw for Watson, if you had to choose?

    Gelernter: No way would I trade my macaw in for any piece of software. Look at him. He’s got a face. He’s got a big smile on his beak. He’s a creature who does have emotions, who has interests, and who is a member of the family. You’d have to offer me a lot more than Watson for my macaw.

    SPIEGEL: Dr. Gelernter, thank you very much for talking to us.

    Interview conducted by Philip Bethge and Manfred Dworschak

    (-> read original article at SPIEGEL ONLINE international)