AC/DC – The Savage Tale of the First Standards War

Title: AC/DC – The Savage Tale of the First Standards War

Author: Tom McNichol

Publisher: Jossey-Bass, 2006 (First)

ISBN: 9780787982676

Pages: 198

 

Civilization as we know it now, would collapse within a few days if electricity is to vanish from the face of the earth on a fine morning. Global communication would be immediately cut off and lack of convenient energy would make the issue a life-threatening one. Electricity comes in two varieties – the type we receive from the distribution lines stretched to our homes and offices and the other kind supplied by batteries and used by electronic devices such as the mobile phone and handheld devices. The first is called ‘alternating current’ or AC which reverses current flow 50 or 60 times a second depending on the country of your domicile. The second variety is called ‘direct current’ or DC which flows in the same direction at all times. The supply companies generate, transmit over long distances and distribute only alternating current (AC) while direct current (DC) is often derived from AC through electronic means. It surprises us now to learn that a savage clash of industrial interests took place between the supporters of AC and DC in the last decade of the nineteenth century when both technologies were making baby steps. Both sides invested money and prestige on the duel in which AC backed by George Westinghouse made a decisive victory while DC supported by Thomas Edison bit the dust. This book tells the gruesome story of the battle and the horrifying tactics used by the DC side. Tom McNichol is a contributing editor for ‘Wired’ magazine. His articles have appeared in leading newspapers and journals in the US.

 

The book begins with a general introduction on mankind’s exposure to the electric effect in the form of static electricity and lightning. Early studies on the effect of electricity on animal muscles are also mentioned. When we reach the nineteenth century, the industrial scenario was ripe for an industrial solution to the growing need for energy for productive work. Edison stepped in to fill the gap. He was a real genius, though little schooled, who had become a full-time inventor in 1869. He had 38 patents to his credit in 1872 and at the peak of his career, a staggering count of 1093 patents stood to his name. Edison’s inventions sometimes were far ahead of its time. His first invention was an electric vote recorder for legislative assembly, which understandably didn’t sell well. The second invention was an improved stock market ticker which won him $40,000. The author makes a shrewd analysis of Edison in terms of his potential and contributions. Edison was at the right place at the right time with the right mind. He came into adulthood at the dawn of the Industrial Age. Had he been born 20 years earlier, he would have found few opportunities as an inventor; had he come along 20 years later, he might have ended up a frustrated researcher at one of the large industrial corporations.

 

Edison pioneered direct current, even though his interest was kindled in it in order to provide power to the incandescent lamps he was developing and planning to install countrywide. He experimented with various voltages, or electrical pressures. Too much voltage would quickly overheat and rupture the element; too low a voltage and there will not be enough light. He finally settled on 110 volts as a standard, which is still with us today. All of North America and a handful of other countries still operate on 110 or 120 V electrical system. Edison set up a central generating station working on DC which provided power to customers within a mile’s radius of the station. DC was not amenable to extension of the line as the losses on the cable mounted with distance. This required more generating stations evenly distributed around the city. But urban land was of prime value which increased the capital cost. Being of a reasonably low voltage, the distribution lines had to be thick, requiring more copper and still more cash.

 

McNichol then sets the stage for the oncoming battle. Edison’s only competition was in Europe, where the electricity market was cutting a different path. In 1882, Lucien Gaulard and John Gibbs patented the AC system for distributing electricity. In the US, George Westinghouse turned his sights to the new technology. AC transmission was largely unproven, but it had some interesting qualities. Articles in American trade journals were regularly hostile to AC, dismissing it as an unnecessary and unworkable alternative. Critics contended that in stepping up voltages to several thousands of volts to transmit power, much of the energy would be lost in the form of heat. But this was not so. Higher voltages meant lower current to be transmitted and it could be sent over longer distances. Conductor sizes also reduced. One central station could serve more customers in a wider geographical area. Just at that time, Westinghouse met Nikola Tesla whose concept of the AC induction motor provided a simple, rugged and lower cost solution to industrial drives.

 

And then, the standards war broke out. Edison’s side claimed that DC was safe and AC was a safety hazard that can electrocute the public. Harold Brown, an Edison accomplice and self-styled electrical engineer (the first one in history!) recommended that AC voltage is to be limited to 300V to avoid the danger it posed. This required heavier copper, effectively pricing AC out of the market. Brown then conducted a horrifying series of experiments to convince the public about the safety risks of AC. He performed electrocution tests on dogs, calves and horses and tabulated the results. These are reproduced in the book which gives a chill down the spine. Before he was finished, Brown experimented on 44 dogs at the Edison Lab, torturing them all but a handful. But the public was not convinced, who knew that DC also was equally dangerous. The commercial advantages of AC ensured its eventual victory. Edison was not in the habit of losing, and the idea of defeat in such a large enterprise as electricity only stoked his competitive nature.

 

Within four years of the standards war, DC lost. Edison’s company had purchased AC patents in 1886 as a hedge. Edison could have shifted some of his company’s resources to the AC standard and quickly made up lost ground on Westinghouse. But he stubbornly refused to budge – the AC patents purchased by the company were allowed to lapse. The investors then edged Edison out of the company. In 1892, Edison’s General Electric and Thomson-Houston combined to form the General Electric Company, which became a legend in the history of AC and electrical engineering. DC was still used in the 1900s for battery-run cars. But the invention of the automobile electric starter in 1912 eliminated the need for the hand crank of internal combustion engine, making petrol-powered cars as easy as to start electric cars. The discovery of Texas crude oil dramatically reduced the price of fuel, making it affordable for the average working man. Electric cars then faded out of the picture.

 

The book then looks at the modern setting where DC has made a decent and impressive comeback. The development of electronic devices ensured the continuation of DC. The new LED lighting also relies on DC. AC’s advantage was in high voltage transmission but DC is fast catching up with it after the invention of high voltage valves. The HVDC system has other advantages such as stability as well in interconnecting two AC grids asynchronously. The author then concludes that like in the standards war, all victories are provisional, all defeats subject to revision. Advances in technology, changes in the market place, in the way people live and what they value can overturn even the most entrenched technical standard. The book is easy to read even for a lay person.

 

The book is highly recommended.

 

Rating: 3 Star

Midnight in Chernobyl

Title: Midnight in Chernobyl – The Untold Story of the World’s Greatest Nuclear Disaster

Author: Adam Higginbotham

Publisher: Bantam, 2019 (First)

ISBN: 9780593076842

Pages: 538

In its bid to build up an industrial infrastructure rivalling the West, the erstwhile Soviet Union turned to nuclear power in a big way. A lot of nuclear reactors that generated electric power came up in many parts of the sprawling nation. Chernobyl in Ukraine was one such unit housing four reactors using the Russian-developed RBMK technology, each generating 1000 megawatt of electricity. Construction of two new reactors was progressing at a furious pace in 1986. On the night of April 26 of that year, a terrible explosion occurred in Unit Four that transformed the destiny of the nuclear power industry and accelerated – to a considerable extent – the downfall of communism in the world. At the time of the mishap, the V I Lenin nuclear power station at Chernobyl was the world's largest nuclear power complex. The explosion caused the release of tons of deadly radioactive material into the atmosphere which landed back on ground as dust and rain. The entire Europe was also affected by the nuclear fallout. The authorities had to evacuate the whole population from a zone running thirty kilometres in all directions of the plant. Chernobyl accident was caused by careless planning, sloppy operation, and serious design problems pushed under the carpet. This book tells the story of the incident in panoramic detail. Adam Higginbotham is a journalist who has written for major American newspapers and lives in New York City.

This book presents a critical analysis of the Soviet nuclear program and its unwonted emphasis on secrecy. Accidents were not reported to the international watchdog IAEA. For almost thirty years, both the Soviet public and the world at large were encouraged to believe that the USSR operated the safest nuclear industry in the world. The Communist party controlled all aspects of life in the country and meddled with nuclear technology as well. Nuclear engineers had to study political indoctrination as part of curricula such as the history of the party in the Soviet Union and the social laws established by Marx and developed by Lenin and Brezhnev. Position in the party influenced recruitment such as a person's posting in a plum job. Nikolai Fomin, the operations chief of the Chernobyl plant had risen through party circles and had learnt nuclear physics by a correspondence course!

After outlining the political structure that led to the disaster, the author brings out the design flaws that invited catastrophe. The reactor was huge – as befits the description of any product built inside the iron curtain – having a size twenty times that of Western reactors. Contrary to practice, it had no containment building, the thick concrete dome built around every reactor. Because the RBMK reactor was so immense, building the containment structure would have doubled the cost. The reactor was also riddled with a serious problem called the Positive Void Coefficient. When steam bubbles through water, the displacement of the liquid by the vapour phase reduced its moderating property to control the nuclear reaction. This caused a positive feedback mechanism that undermined reactor stability. The positive void coefficient resulted in runaway chain reactions in the event of a loss of coolant. This was a bane of the RBMK technology. It grew worse as more of the fuel was burnt. The longer it was in operation, the harder the reactor became to control. At the end of the three-year operating cycle, the reactor would be at its most unpredictable.

The extraordinarily large size of the reactor only added to the woes of the operators. Due to the huge size, reaction was often confined to narrow regions. The instrumentation was antiquated and when the control rods were inserted, reaction shot up initially before gradually coming down – another design fault. In addition to the growing list of troubles, the emergency protective system took eighteen seconds to fully insert the control rods to the core to shut down the reactor. In the frenzy to line up the unit at the earliest, several critical tests were postponed during the commissioning stage. The accident occurred when the management had decided to do a rundown test that was long overdue. This test helps to ensure supply of cooling water to the reactor in case of a total blackout. The unit was to be taken out for maintenance after running continuously for three years since its installation. The test and eventual stoppage of the reactor was scheduled during daytime, but the Kiev grid operator refused permission and suggested to stop it after the peak load hours. This pushed the test to begin at around 1:00 am.

An accident is an accident which can happen anywhere and anytime, irrespective of whether the state is socialist or capitalist. What is shocking is the communist state’s obsession with secrecy and cover-up. Every accident that occurred at a nuclear station in the Soviet Union continued to be regarded as a state secret, kept even from the specialists at the installation where they occurred. Even when Chernobyl was making headline news in international media, Soviet citizens were still not informed about the true scale of the disaster and its possible impact on environment and public health. Party-run newspapers relegated highly censored reports to the inner pages, under sports results. Europe took precautions when radioactivity was first detected in Sweden and people made a beeline to drug stores for potassium iodide tablets to keep away harmful effects of radiation. Lack of information bred panic in the West and distrust of the administration in the USSR. In a socialist polity, all parts of the country are supposed to be equal, but the regions where top party leaders reside were more equal than the others. When the wind turned towards Moscow, threatening it with radioactive dust clouds from Chernobyl, Soviet aircrafts flew repeated missions to seed the clouds with silver iodide and forced rain on the countryside. The capital was spared, but hundreds of square kilometres of fertile farmland in Belarus were lashed with black rain containing radioactive graphite particles, rendering the produce unfit for consumption.

However hard you may accuse the socialist system of incompetence and secrecy, once it was awakened out of slumber, the beast did a thorough job of containment and evacuation humanly possible. The author hands out some glowing commendations to the selfless workers who risked their lives to work on the damaged reactor. All souls, except the working crew, were evacuated permanently from a thirty-kilometre zone and all children in Kiev for a few days. Many settlements were decontaminated many times, but homes that resisted the process were simply demolished. Eventually, whole villages were bulldozed flat and buried. Even the leaves on the trees and the earth beneath the feet had become sources of ionizing radiation. The bill for the mitigation measures was a staggering $128 billion. That was equal to the total Soviet defence budget for 1989. This came on the heels of an oil price crash, when oil was a prime source of revenue to the Soviets.

Higginbotham’s focus is on radiation, but he positions a convenient mirror on the life of ordinary people under the Communist party’s dictatorship. USSR had enforced an internal passport system that prevented most citizens from leaving their areas of registration without good reason and concurrence from the authorities. Radio speaker boxes were hardwired in every apartment, piping in propaganda, just like gas and electricity, over three channels – union, republic and city. Even switching it off was regarded with suspicion. The book also talks about the beginning of the end of communism. With Gorbachev's glasnost, the party released its grip on information with more open reporting from Chernobyl. Slowly at first, but then with gathering momentum, the Soviet republic began to discover how deeply it had been misled about the accident and ideology and identity upon which their society was founded. The accident and the government’s inability to protect its population finally shattered the illusion that the USSR was a global superpower armed with technology that led the world. As the state’s attempts to conceal the truth came to light, even the most faithful citizens of the Soviet Union faced the realisation that their leaders were corrupt and that the Communist dream was a sham.

The heroic efforts of the team called ‘liquidators’ to seal off the damaged reactor are thrilling and extol the glory of Soviet dedication. Just five months after the collapse, Unit One reactor came back online and the three remaining reactors eventually continued to pour electricity to the Ukrainian grid till the year 2000. Higginbotham has made several visits to the affected areas as part of his research for this book. This helps him to lay before us a comprehensive picture of things. By 2005, 4700 sq. km of north western Ukraine and southern Belarus was still declared uninhabitable by radiation. Even after three decades, half of the wild boar shot by hunters in the forests of the Czech Republic was still too radioactive for human consumption. However, things are not all bleak. In the exclusion zone, ecological rebirth and renewal is now taking place. Groups of animals are thriving there as if humans are a more serious threat than radiation. Even people are surreptitiously settling inside the exclusion zone. The public health effects, as a whole, were not really as substantial as had at first been feared.

The book is absorbing and pleasing to read. The epilogue summarises the later lives of all major characters in the drama that unfolded on that deadly April night in 1986. A neat glossary and a description of radiation-related terms add to the appeal. That can't be said about the many photographic plates included in it. The monochrome images are more of people than of events and vistas related in the text.

The book is highly recommended.

Rating: 4 Star

Chernobyl – History of a Tragedy

Title: Chernobyl – History of a Tragedy

Author: Serhii Plokhy

Publisher: Allen Lane, 2018 (First)

ISBN: 9780241349021

Pages: 404

Weather you bat for or against it, nuclear power generation has a certain charm associated with it. It is non-polluting, clean and good value for money. The energy produced by an entire rail rake-load of coal in a thermal station can be generated by nuclear fuel that can be comfortably put in the boot of a passenger car. Besides, it is a product of twentieth century physics unlike thermal, hydro- or wind, the principles of which were with mankind from the earliest times. The risks associated with the safe operation of a nuclear reactor and the disposal of spent fuel makes the designers vary of embracing it. The public is also normally averse to have a working reactor in their midst, having raised through textbooks showing the mushroom clouds of bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Nuclear energy is, in fact quite safe, having caused only three major accidents in its history spanning seven decades - Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima and the last one was not due to any human error. The accident that attracted international attention was the disaster in Unit 4 of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Ukraine of the erstwhile USSR on 26 April 1986. Thirty-one people were killed in the mishap, two by the explosion itself and twenty-nine from the effects of radiation. While these figures are not awful, the fallout of radioactive material that spread to various parts of Ukraine and Europe as a whole had caused an immense health threat to millions of people. This book tells a detailed story of how the disaster occurred, what are the steps that led to it, who were involved in and after the accident and how the regime coped with international public opinion in the aftermath. Serhii Plokhy is a Ukrainian-American historian and author specializing in the history of Ukraine. He serves as professor of Ukrainian history at Harvard University.

The book makes a detailed study of the Chernobyl plant and the explosive impact of the accident, but the figures seem to be slightly exaggerated. The blast was said to be equivalent to 500 Hiroshima bombs. Also, each reactor had 500 pounds of enriched Uranium as fuel. If the other three reactors of the plant had been damaged by the explosion then hardly any living and breathing organism would have remained on the planet, the author claims. However this assertion is simply hyperbole. The explosion that occurred was due to steam at very high pressure which caused radioactive material scatter into the atmosphere. No comparison with Hiroshima there! It was the third largest nuclear plant in the world with four reactors producing 1000 megawatt of electricity each and a fifth one under construction. The construction of the plant had begun in 1970 and the first reactor became operational in 1977. The fourth reactor which caused the accident was functional for just two years and three months when it was destroyed. A flourishing little city called Prypiat had developed near the site to house the workers. After the accident, the town was evacuated and still remains as a ghost town like a modern-day Pompeii. The town hears the footfall of only the occasional tourist. Plokhy has made use of newly available archival material and KGB documents.

The constant refrain of the Soviet academic and technical community was that the operators of the plant were to be blamed for the catastrophe. This is given special attention in the book and debunked as a myth. The reactor which belonged to a type designated as RBMK was inherently cheaper to fabricate than the rival type VVER. The most fundamental difference between the two is that in the RBMK, water is boiled to steam in the reactor core itself and the steam is used to drive a turbine to produce power. The VVER heats up pressured water in the core which is then used to make steam from another independent water circuit on which turbine is run. The RBMK scored only on the cost parameter by letting go of many safety-related structures such as the concrete containing dome that surrounds any reactor. They are virtually open to atmosphere. In Chernobyl itself, a fuel channel had burst in 1982 after repair and radiation shot up to 10 times the normal but was eventually contained. Several such episodes prompted the authorities to impose censorship on reporting of nuclear accidents in the country. Moreover, leakage of radioactive water at the rate of 50 cubic metres per hour was continuously coming out from the drains from numerous small leaks inside. The management was oblivious to such flaws and concentrated only on increasing the output. Just the previous year, in 1985, the plant produced 10% more energy than its target partly by cutting time spent on repairs.

Almost a hundred pages are reserved to describe the fateful events that unfolded on the two days of April 26 and 27. The maintenance team wanted to conduct a test to determine how long the lubricating oil pumps of the turbine would run when the steam input is cut off. The test was scheduled to begin at 2 pm, but the grid authority denied permission to shutdown the reactor. The emergency cooling water valves were already closed for this test and nobody bothered to reopen the heavy valves. This did not contribute to the accident but serves as an indicator of the lax culture of safety in the plant. The test was eventually conducted at 1.23 am the next day and the answer came out to be 40 seconds. But in the process, the reactor became hopelessly unstable and one erroneous thing led to other big blunders. Very soon, the reaction became uncontrolled when the operators tried to take an emergency shutdown. Two big steam explosions resulted in the 200-ton containment barrier flying into the air. The graphite blocks and fuel rods of the reactor caught fire when it was showered all over the place. These were deadly radioactive. The firefighters who tried to extinguish the fire from the roof of the reactor hall got sick within half an hour. The radiation sickness started with a severe headache, dry throat and nausea. Even though the fire could be contained by 7 am, most of the early firefighters had absorbed lethal doses of radiation. Most of them died later.

What had happened thus far was pardonable to a certain extent. Design flaws and human errors can happen anywhere. But, the suppression of information about the accident could take place only in a dictatorship such as the one run by the Communists. The authorities kept mum on the terrible happening while children freely roamed the streets of Prypiat where seven weddings took place during daytime. While radioactive dust was settling over the civilian population, the party officials progressed through confusion, disbelief and denial. This was not new in the Soviet Union. In 1957, they had similarly suppressed disclosure of an explosion in a plutonium facility in Ozersk, which was almost in the middle of the gargantuan Russian vastness. But Chernobyl was near the border and two days later, radioactivity was detected in the Forsmark nuclear plant in Sweden, situated 1257 km away. Soviets had to break silence at 9 pm on that day through a terse announcement on TV. Even then, no newspaper published the story. Kyiv, the capital of Ukraine, was 130 km away but radiation levels soared. However, the party was defiant and promptly carried out the May Day parade through its streets, risking the lives of the participants. Even general bulletins on what to do in case of radiation sickness had to be got cleared by the Ukrainian politburo. The first televised address on how to cope with radiation was aired ten days later by which time the people no longer trusted the party and the government.

The collective effort to contain the damaged reactor is a heroic tale of self-sacrifice and dedication of the Soviet people. Volunteers from other services called liquidators were used to mop up radioactive debris from the premises while tons of sand was heaped over the reactor through dangerous maneuvers by helicopter pilots. These volunteers were mobilized by the party apparatus and many of them would suffer severe health problems in the coming years. The military decontaminated fields and villages sometimes by burying entire forests by bulldozing. It is estimated that the abandoned town of Prypiat would not be habitable for the next 20,000 years. Plokhy then links the disaster to the rise of dissidence in Ukraine. Organisations such as Rukh and Green World took root under the guise of environmental activism. As Ukraine turned Independent, it instituted schemes to help the victims. A Chernobyl tax of 12% was slapped on corporate income. At the same time, it reduced the acceptable level of lifetime radiation exposure to 7 rem from 35 rem.

What happened next was a climb down from principles as the nascent Ukrainian state battled hard on the economic front. It wanted to close down Chernobyl, but could not do it on account of the cheap power it produced and the considerable employment opportunities it provided. The other three reactors continued production even in the face of heightened radiation risks. Accidents continued to occur. In 1991, a major fire in Unit 2 caused by a faulty switch in the turbine destroyed part of the roof of turbine hall. Unit 2 was immediately closed and the other two units continued production till December 15, 2000 when at last the Chernobyl plant was permanently shut down. Construction of two new nuclear plants was going on at that time at Rivne, and Khmelnytskyi which were connected to the grid in 2004. The country has not divorced nuclear power even though the economic fallout of the disaster was heavy on the whole, since seven million people had received some form of compensation.

The author was a professor of a Ukrainian university at the time Chernobyl threw up the radioactive material. Readers get a first-hand assessment of the sentiments of the Ukrainian public on the shifting stands of their Soviet masters. Written in an elegant, flowing style, the book is very enjoyable in spite of the macabre content. Plokhy is successful in bringing out the soul of Ukrainian resistance to ideological domination. Some photos should have been added to the narrative to give it some more visual appeal.

The book is highly recommended.

Rating: 4 Star