Can Hydrogen Save Aviation’s Fuel Challenges? It’s Got a Way to Go.

Small, experimental hydrogen-powered planes are paving the way for net-zero carbon aviation by 2050. But the route is rocky.


Credit...Matt Williams

By Roy Furchgott
Nov. 15, 2021

This article is part of our series on the Future of Transportation, which is exploring innovations and challenges that affect how we move about the world.

A fully fueled Boeing 787-10 Dreamliner can fly roughly 8,000 miles while ferrying 300 or so passengers and their luggage. A battery with the energy equivalent to that fuel would weigh about 6.6 million pounds. That’s why — despite environmental advantages — we don’t have battery-powered electric airliners.

But aviation companies working to make cleaner aircraft are exploring the use of hydrogen, the world’s most abundant element, to power both electric and combustion engines — and to make air travel more eco-friendly

Hydrogen-powered planes are already aloft, although mostly as small, experimental aircraft. Yet those planes are helping to pave the way for net-zero carbon aviation by 2050, the goal set by many government and environmental groups. But hydrogen isn’t without controversy: For now, it’s expensive, not always green, and some say dangerous.

“There are three ways of using hydrogen as fuel onboard an aircraft,” said Amanda Simpson, who leads green initiatives for the aircraft manufacturer Airbus. Hydrogen can be a source of power for batterylike fuel cells, in hybrid aircraft, or as combustible fuel.

Alternative-fuel technologies are well established in the automotive world, of course. Cars that burn alternative fuels — remember diesels converted to burn used French-fry oil? — have been around since the earliest days of horseless carriages. And hybrid gas and electric cars, such as the Toyota Prius, have been available since 1997. But only a few models, including the Toyota Mirai and the Hyundai Nexo, use hydrogen fuel cells.

When Val Miftakhov founded ZeroAvia to develop electric aircraft, he first considered battery power. A Siberian émigré and physicist, his earlier start-up converted gasoline cars to electric, then incorporated an improved charging system. But batteries can sustain only the shortest excursions, like training flights. “Where a mission is an hour, batteries might work,” he said. Battery-powered trainers also exist, such as the Pipistrel Alfa Electro which claims a one-hour flight time.

ZeroAvia instead chose fuel cells, which are essentially a chemical battery that substitutes lighter-than-air hydrogen for the weighty lithium ion. Hydrogen is notable for its energy density — the amount of energy per kilogram — which is about three times that of jet fuel. The byproduct of burning hydrogen is water. Hydrogen can be made from water and renewable energy, although most is now made from natural gas, which is not particularly green.

Mr. Miftakhov acknowledged that hydrogen storage containers, which were generally designed for ground transportation, were not practical for aircraft. “We need to focus on reducing the weight,” he said, “We have some fairly low-hanging fruit.”

Unlike electric batteries, hydrogen fuel cells can be recharged in minutes, but there is a lack of fueling stations, and building them would be a huge undertaking

That problem is less critical for hybrid aircraft, which use a combination of electric and combustion power, said Pat Anderson, a professor of Aerospace Engineering at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University. “It can pull up to a fuel pump that exists today and fill up,” he said.

Mr. Anderson’s students used a hybrid system in a 2011 eco-flight competition. They didn’t win, but it sold Mr. Anderson on the merits of hybrid power engines, which he now builds at VerdeGo Aero, a Florida company that counts Erik Lindbergh, an X-Prize Foundation board member and Charles Lindbergh’s grandson, as executive chairman.

Modern hybrid systems can use a variable mix of electric and combustion power, and can even use the combustion motor as an electric generator in flight. It may give planes more range than battery or fuel cells alone, Mr. Anderson said.

Whatever the power source, there are some advantages specific to electric engines, said Roei Ganzarski, who leads two companies: MagniX, which makes electric propulsion systems for aircraft, and Eviation which is developing the futuristic-looking Alice electric aircraft. One advantage is cost.
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“Airplanes today are really, really expensive, and the main reason is the engines,” he said. They require a lot of maintenance and consume a lot of expensive fuel. “I can reduce the operating cost of that plane around 40 to 50 percent on average,” he claimed. That’s because electric motors are comparatively maintenance free.

Harbour Air, which bills itself as “the world’s largest seaplane airline,” is seeking permission to carry passengers on its MagniX electric-powered de Havilland dhc-2 Beaver. A 10-passenger Cessna Grand has also flown with a MagniX engine.

There are some things electric power cannot achieve, like lifting that 787. But that doesn’t mean big jets can’t go green, or at least greener. Several fuel refiners and airlines are experimenting with Sustainable Aviation Fuels, known as SAFs. These fuels, which burn just like the common “Jet A” fuel, can be made from waste such as used cooking fats. Some companies, like Neste, use hydrogen in refining its SAF fuel.

Although aviation safety organizations allow commercial aircraft to use fuel containing 50 percent or less SAF, in demonstrations, existing jets have burned 100-percent SAF, “and the engines are very happy with it,” Ms. Simpson of Airbus said.

But SAF may be seen as a stopgap, as larger planes have flown happily burning emissions-free pure hydrogen. In 1957, a Martin B-57B powered part of a flight using hydrogen as fuel. In 1988, a Soviet TU-155 airliner flew on hydrogen fuel alone.

For Senator Spark Matsunaga, a Democrat of Hawaii who died in 1990, it was a missed opportunity — as significant as Soviet’s Sputnik satellite beating the United States into space. “Once again we’ve missed the boat,” he said, “and we can only hope that the next administration will be more interested in hydrogen than this one has been.”

Any mention of hydrogen aircraft means addressing the zeppelin in the room. Although hydrogen has been used in ballooning since 1783, its aeronautical future dimmed on May 6, 1937, when the zeppelin Hindenburg very publicly burned in Lakehurst, N.J. killing 36. It is still debated if the flames, immortalized on radio and in newsreels (and a Led Zeppelin album cover), were caused mostly by hydrogen or the incendiary paint used on the airship’s fabric skin. Regardless, the damage to hydrogen’s reputation lingers today.

More recently, ZeroAvia experienced a bad news/good news scenario when its hydrogen-fuel-cell-powered Piper Malibu Mirage M350 crash landed last April. The good news was that no one was hurt, despite the plane losing a wing. Better still, with no fuel to leak and no hot engine to ignite it, there was no Hindenburg-like conflagration.

“The hydrogen system itself all held up perfectly,” Mr. Miftakhov said. “The emergency crew said if it were a fossil-fuel plane it would have been a major fire.”

But the big argument against hydrogen has not been safety but cost. Although “green” hydrogen can be produced with water and renewable energy, most produced now is so-called “gray hydrogen” made using fossil fuels, which is not much cleaner than burning those fuels themselves.

Hydrogen proponents say that technological improvements and larger scale facilities could bring the cost down to $1 per kilogram, the point at which it is competitive with fossil fuel. Part of the Biden administration’s “Earthshots” initiative is a proposed $400 million investment in 2022 toward reaching the $1 per kilogram mark within 10 years.

Hydrogen boosters like Mr. Ganzarski argue that while green hydrogen may initially be costly to make, the cost of not pursuing hydrogen aircraft may be greater. It is with some understatement that he said, “Emissions are not good for our health.”


A version of this article appears in print on Nov. 16, 2021, Section B, Page 4 of the New York edition with the headline: Will Hydrogen Be Aviation’s Eco-Friendly Fuel?. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

  

Why You Should Care About Small Nuclear Reactors

The future might depend on it.

Nov 11, 2021By  Brad Bergan

A computer rendering of a future SMR site.Rolls-Royce 

Nuclear power could become a crucial feature in a world free of fossil fuels.

This is why Rolls-Royce secured financial backing from a consortium of private investors and the U.K. government to build small modular nuclear reactors capable of generating cleaner energy in the region, according to a press release from the company.

As of writing, roughly 16% of the United Kingdom's electricity comes from nuclear power, but this could start dropping soon. "A lot of existing reactors [in the U.K.] are nearing the end of their lifetime," said Professor Michael Fitzpatrick, Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Engineering, Environment, and Computing at the U.K.'s Coventry University, who's also an expert in nuclear energy, to Interesting Engineering. "We have to be replacing these just to stand still in terms of keeping nuclear at its portion of the electricity grid."

And, as more nations face the hard facts of solar and wind's intermittency issues, new investments in nuclear power like Rolls-Royce's small modular reactors could help the world balance the energy gaps left by renewables, and achieve net-zero carbon goals, on time.

Rolls-Royce's new SMR nuclear reactors will help the UK achieve its net-zero carbon goals

Following the roughly $260 million (£195 million) cash injection from private firms, in addition to the roughly $280 million (£210 million) from the U.K. government, the Rolls-Royce Small Modular Reactor (SMR) company was formally announced. And it could generate up to 40,000 jobs by 2050, according to a BBC report. Small Modular Reactors are essentially just like conventional ones; they use fuels like uranium to heat water, and then transfer that thermal energy into electrical energy, releasing only harmless steam (water vapor) into the atmosphere. But SMRs are tailored to suit any economic scenario. "SMRs allow you to do a mix where the endpoint is the same," said Fitzpatrick to IE. "The same ability to meet energy demands, but at different levels of commitment", both financially and in terms of scale. "It's a lower up-front cost, with a shorter build time."

In the release, Rolls-Royce SMR said one of its power stations would take up the space equivalent to roughly one-tenth of the space of conventional nuclear plants, and generate enough power to supply electricity to one million households. One SMR plant could generate 470 MW of power, which could be thrown into the mix of conventionally renewable power, like the more than 150 onshore wind turbines. Each SMR should cost roughly $2.7 billion (£2 billion) to construct, far less than the roughly $27 billion (£20 billion) needed to build conventional (full-scale) reactors. This lower cost makes SMRs a more viable alternative to fossil fuels, on similar financial standing as major wind and solar installations.

Solar and wind lack the means to store adequate power

Critics of the new investment in nuclear and the Rolls-Royce SMR business argue that the focus of the energy industry should be on renewable power, instead of new nuclear. But according to Fitzpatrick, this is a false dilemma. "The question of renewables and nuclear shouldn't be seen as an either/or," he said. "In the same way, we should be investing in many energy storage options, including hydrogen." Still, this raises the question: is nuclear really clean energy? It still produces toxic waste, and that's bad for the environment. But the kind of waste we see from nuclear power isn't driving a global climate catastrophe. "The waste is unpleasant stuff and it's potentially harmful," explained Fitzpatrick to IE. "But stacked against CO2, you're not really comparing like with like." The surge in global temperatures is directly linked to CO2 levels, which are drastically reshaping our atmosphere to the limits of human habitability, almost single-handedly thanks to fossil fuel industries.

"In other words, nuclear waste does not raise the same problem that fossil fuel pollution creates," said Fitzpatrick. And they also address a major issue with solar and wind power, which can't store enough power when there's no wind or sunlight. "Right now renewables suffer from intermittency. When wind speed drops, you need a gas turbine to cover" for wind turbines. "In the U.K. we've restarted coal fire plants to cover the gap. You need a way of storage for what's being generated by renewables (and we're no way near at the scale to do that)." It's difficult to overstate how serious this flaw in solar and wind can be on a practical level. "Would society accept on a calm still winter night that we should be prepared to do without heating in hospitals, or industry in general?" asked Fitzpatrick, rhetorically. The waste from nuclear power is also a flaw, but its effects don't tread water next to the ravages of excess CO2.

France, too, is investing in nuclear power

"Some people say you just can't store waste underground" like it's an absolute ethical principle, added Fitzpatrick to IE. "But carbon storage is exactly that; storing waste underground. And CO2 is the same forever. It has no half-life." The advantages of using nuclear often go unspoken because it simply hasn't shared the same spotlight that renewables have in the last decade or two. But "with nuclear, you're taking a tech that we know works, and investing it to deploy rapidly at scale." And the U.K. is not alone in realizing this.

On Tuesday, President Macron announced that France will build new nuclear reactors, specifically to meet global warming targets and keep energy prices under control, according to a Reuters report. This fits Fitzpatrick's rationale for emphasizing nuclear in national grids throughout the world. "If you're serious about making decarbonization commitments, you have to be investing in nuclear. We need a low-carbon baseload, and I think more governments are going to come to that conclusion, and I think that's going to drive a global nuclear renaissance." Right now, solar and wind power have already reached a serious limit, and it's one that was there all along: when the sun goes down, and the wind calms, there's not enough stored energy to keep an energy grid going. "Right at the moment the way we cover the intermittency gap is by using fossil fuels," said Fitzpatrick. But nuclear can fill these gaps, maintain energy levels, and it's just getting started. "Nuclear should not just be about technologies we have today, but also about the technologies we want to build in 30, 40, or 50 years."

Thorium-Fueled Reactors Offer Huge Potential Benefits for the Nuclear Power Industry

Nuclear power opponents often point to radioactive waste as one of their main concerns. However, most people don’t realize that problems associated with long-lived waste can actually be solved in an economic way with technology that’s already well-proven. Long-lived actinides can be “burned” in a thorium molten salt reactor (MSR), or a breeder reactor. They do not burn fast, but in this way, it is possible to convert the most problematic part of the waste from something that needs to be stored safely for tens of thousands of years to fission products that only need to be stored safely for about 300 years.

“Breeding is where you actually convert what’s called a fertile fuel—and thorium is one of these fertile fuels—you convert that into something which you can fission, and then you have to make sure that that process actually doesn’t stop—that it continues to create more and more new fuel,” Thomas Jam Pedersen, co-founder of Copenhagen Atomics, said as a guest on The POWER Podcast. “That’s what Copenhagen Atomics is trying to prove to the world—that it’s not merely something that you can show from physics that it’s possible, but you could actually also build it and make it work.”

The concept is not new. MSRs—a class of reactors that use liquid salt, usually fluoride- or chloride-based, as either a coolant with a solid fuel or as a combined coolant and fuel with the fuel dissolved in a carrier salt—underwent significant testing in the 1950s and 1960s at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in Tennessee. Subsequent design studies in the 1970s focusing on thermal-spectrum thorium-fueled systems established reference concepts for two major design variants, one of which was a molten salt breeder reactor with multiple configurations that could breed additional fissile material or maintain self-sustaining operation.

One reason the testing stopped was because thorium is not well-suited for making nuclear weapons, so the military was not interested in investing in the technology. “It was, from the very get-go, far behind the investments in the uranium fuel cycle, and therefore, most people were educated in the uranium fuel cycle,” Pedersen said.

In the late 2000s, that changed, because documents from the ORNL testing were released to the public. “People started to discover, ‘Oh, there’s actually something here that is quite exciting.’ Because thorium is the only element where you can make breeder cycle, or breeder reactor, in thermal spectrum, and thermal spectrum is sort of, you can say, the easy reactors to build,” Pedersen explained

Molten salt is an important part of the process because it allows fission products to be removed from the reactor during operation. In the past, corrosion was a serious problem when using molten salt, but with today’s advanced materials, it’s less of a concern and less expensive to control. “Back in the day, there was not that much material science, and it was difficult to make the salt clean enough that you could minimize the corrosion,” said Pedersen. “I think this is where we’ve gotten a step ahead now with modern technology.”

Copenhagen Atomics’ goal is to have a 100-MWth (roughly 45-MWe) reactor unit available commercially by 2028. Units are expected to be built in a factory, using an assembly-line process, and will be roughly the size of a standard shipping container, which will allow them to be delivered easily to plant construction sites around the world. Customers would be able to install multiple units at a site to effectively create almost any size plant.

“One of the problems with classical reactors is that they’re usually really, really big and built onsite, and are quite expensive, and take many years to build,” Pedersen said. “We started this company because we want to change that. We want to be able to deploy these reactors much faster. Our ambition is to build more than one every day.”

The company expects to have a non-fission prototype unit ready for operation next year. “We will be able to test it—it’s a one-to-one scale model of the reactor—we will not be able to run fission inside, but we can start it up and we can pump the salt around and we can test all the systems—see that it’s working,” Pedersen said. Copenhagen Atomics is targeting 2025 to have a fully functioning demonstration reactor in operation.

One additional advantage of the MSR is that molten salt is a great energy storage medium, so Pedersen said he envisions storage tanks at plant sites that will allow units to operate as baseload units, even in a renewable-filled market. “We plan to put all the output energy into that tank when, say, the wind is blowing. And then when the wind is not blowing, then you can both take the power from the reactor and you can take some of the additional power from those storage tanks.”

The cost? “I think it’ll be a much cheaper energy form than classical nuclear reactors, and I think we can even compete with some of the cheapest forms of wind power or solar power,” said Pedersen. Furthermore, the thorium-fueled units will be dispatchable. “We can supply energy 24/7, and therefore, the value of our energy source is higher in the grid than it would be if you buy the same electricity from solar.”

To hear the full interview with Pedersen, which includes information about partners, the research and development process, how exciting new reactor technology is inspiring younger people to join the industry, and more, listen to The POWER Podcast. Click on the SoundCloud player below to listen in your browser now or use the following links to reach the show page on your favorite podcast platform:

The POWER Podcast · 101. Thorium-Fueled Reactors Offer Huge Potential Benefits for the Nuclear Power Industry

For more power podcasts, visit The POWER Podcast archives.

—Aaron Larson is POWER’s executive editor (@AaronL_Power, @POWERmagazine).

Industry’s First Complete Accident-Tolerant Nuclear Assembly in Operation at Calvert Cliffs

The first complete accident-tolerant fuel (ATF) assembly is now operational at Exelon’s Calvert Cliffs Nuclear Power Plant Unit 2 in Maryland, bringing an industry-led quest to accelerate commercialization of the new nuclear technology closer to fruition.

Inserted during the plant’s recent spring refueling outage, the lead fuel assembly (LFA) features a Framatome PROtect fuel design that was developed under the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Accident Fuel program. The pioneering LFA includes 176 chromium-coated rods and chromia-enhanced pellets that are “more tolerant to changes in reactor core temperatures increasing coping time, while reducing corrosion and the production of hydrogen under high-temperature conditions,” the French nuclear giant said.

According to the DOE, the advanced fuel will now operate in the reactor for the next four to six years and will be routinely inspected to monitor its performance. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) in January amended Exelon’s Calvert Cliff operating license, allowing Exelon to install up to two Framatome PROtect lead test assemblies at the 1.9-GW nuclear plant’s two 860-MW pressurized water reactors for up to three cycles.

The Framatome PROtect accident tolerant fuel assembly undergoes final

 inspection before delivery to Exelon’s Calvert Cliffs Unit 2 in Lusby, Maryland. 

Courtesy: Framatome

Framatome noted that the LFA was fabricated at its manufacturing facility in Richland, Washington, as part of a 2019 contract with Exelon Generation. However, the new fuel prototype builds on previous testing in the U.S., including an 18-month fuel cycle test, and Switzerland through Framatome’s PROtect program.“Loading the first complete accident tolerant fuel assembly is a huge milestone for Framatome and the nuclear energy industry,” said Lionel Gaiffe, senior executive vice president of Framatome’s Fuel Business Unit.

Frank Goldner, a nuclear engineer within DOE’s Office of Nuclear Energy, noted the milestone is also a triumph for Exelon and “the entire industry at large.” ATF, an industry concept used to describe new technologies in the form of new cladding and/or fuel pellet designs, has morphed into a key priority for the U.S. nuclear power industry because it promises to improve the existing nuclear fleet’s cost competitiveness in power markets that are increasingly inundated with cheap renewables and natural gas power. “Accident tolerant fuels are expected to enhance the performance of today’s reactors and will help fuel our future path to reaching net-zero emissions by 2050,” Goldner added

ATFs Set for ‘Widespread’ Adoption by 2030

While ATF technologies have been under development since the early 2000s, they received a marked boost in the wake of the March 2011 Fukushima accident as the DOE aggressively implemented plans under its Congressionally mandated Enhanced Accident Tolerant Fuel (EATF) program to develop ATFs for existing light water reactors (LWRs). The DOE has said these technologies are being developed under an “accelerated timeframe,” owing mainly to the status of the nation’s current fleet of reactors. Earlier this year, the agency told POWER a private-public collaboration to commercialize ATFs is “still on track for initial commercial introduction of accident tolerant fuel by 2025.”

Backed by the DOE and monitored by the NRC, since spring 2018, GE’s Global Nuclear Fuel (GNF), Westinghouse, and Framatome have so far loaded lead test assemblies (LTAs) containing “near-term” ATF technologies at 10 U.S. nuclear plants. Tests of loaded fuel are ongoing or planned at another four nuclear plants.

Key accident-tolerant fuel milestones at various U.S. power plants. 

Courtesy: Nuclear Energy Institute (August 2021)

The DOE said on Tuesday all three vendors are “currently on track to have their accident tolerant fuels ready for batch loading by the mid-2020s and with commercial widespread adoption by 2030.”

A Brief Recap of ATF Achievements

So far, GNF has tested several different iron-chromium-aluminum (FeCrAl) alloys for cladding. In December 2020, Oak Ridge National Laboratory said it received the first GNF-developed nuclear fuel test rods, which spent 24 months at Southern Co.’s Edwin Hatch nuclear plant. The test samples feature IronClad, an FeCrAl fuel cladding, and ARMOR, a hard, oxidation-resistant coating layered on top of zirconium cladding with uranium oxide (UO2) fuel (which GNF originally created outside of the DOE’s ATF program).

Framatome, meanwhile, is working to commercialize a near-term ATF design that involves chromium-coated zirconium alloy cladding with chromia (Cr2O3)–doped UO2 fuel. Four GAIA LTAs containing Framatome’s advanced chromium coating (which is added to its proprietary M5 zirconium alloy cladding) and the chromia-doped pellets were removed after an 18-month cycle at Southern Co.’s Vogtle 2 plant in August 2020. Two other 18-month cycles of operation for the LTAs are planned. Framatome’s concepts are also being tested at Entergy’s Arkansas Nuclear One (ANO) Unit 1. In the fall of 2019, ANO Unit 1 inserted 32 Framatome Cr-coated lead test rods. The full assembly inserted at Calvert Cliffs this spring includes Cr-coated M5 cladding and Cr2O3-doped UO2 fuel.

Westinghouse is also testing several “near-term” technologies developed under its EnCore Fuel brand. These include “improved chromium-coated cladding that inhibits the zirconium-steam reaction and increases maximum temperature by an additional 300C,” as well as Westinghouse’s proprietary ADOPT fuel pellets, which are chromia and alumina (Cr2O3 + Al2O3)—doped UO2. The additives in the doped fuel “facilitate greater densification and diffusion during sintering, resulting in a higher density and an enlarged grain size as compared to undoped UO2,” the company said in topical report that the NRC accepted for review in September 2020.

—Sonal Patel is a POWER senior associate editor (@sonalcpatel, @POWERmagazine).

The Forty Years War: Tariq Ali and Afghanistan

BY PAUL BUHLE
NOVEMBER 12, 2021


Photograph Source: Mike Pryor – Public Domain

Tariq Ali’s book, The Forty Years War, is an event, within the larger event of the US withdrawal from Afghanistan. No one, Left or Right, has followed the misadventure of US policy there with such dogged attention and keen insight. Nor, within the UK itself, of much higher visibility. From the pages of the Guardian to the London Review of Books and even in public dialogue with a key British foreign advisor (under Labour), his views have been discussed and debated, we can imagine, at the highest levels. Recent turns of the wheel (or screw) have vindicated him a thousand times over.

Tariq Ali, a Marxist theorist and historian of note, lecturer across continents, an editor of New Left Review, longtime contributor to CounterPunch and so on, happens also to be very much a participant in the regional events around the Indian subcontinent and nearby Afghanistan. He is Pakistani by origin—or rather in the part of India that would become Pakistan—as everyone knows. Far away from his homeland more than a half-century, apart from visits, he commands intimate knowledge of the people of the region, the contradictions, hopes and despair marking the post-colonial era. All this is part of him.

Here is a source, if by no means the only source, of his unique insights. There is no “Afghanistan Question” without a “Pakistani Question.” The flow back and forth across the borders artificially created by the colonial powers has not ceased, but rather accelerated with the internal strife, the blundering Russian effort to perpetuate a buffer state against Western instrusions, and the following catastrophe of US invasion and occupation.

Ali explains and explores briefly the deep reality of geography and demography. Afghanistan is one of the poorest regions of the world, under any or all ideological or military or any other leadership. The names of the rulers do not alter the multiplicity

of different populations divided by tradition more than ideology, nor do the claims made for “change” or “modernization” create more water or arable land. Poppies thrive, now 90% of the world’s source for heroin, because alternatives do not allow survivable conditions.

Thus follows the geopolitical nightmare of US efforts, a redux of the British imperial project in the same valleys, updated by vast military technology and the capacity to create an almost American Suburban lifestyle that British soldiers would have envied (perhaps only the invaders’ access to the local sex traffic has remained largely the same). As the text reveals, beyond the boundaries of the invaders’ temporary holdings an artificial civil society can be created (we can be sure yesteryear’s British Afghanistanis read English novels and played cricket), the rest of society is lagely untouched except by devastating attacks on all sides, endless poverty and misery.

But Ali’s focus for much of this precise and careful book is the nature of the Western and if especially American, also British illusion. As he says, China, Russia and and most of Kabul expressed a collective relief by the overthrow of the Taliban whose origins could be readily traced to US assistance. The “Wahhabite Emirate” was driven out, but now what? The heart of the problem, of course, had already been obscured by US (and Britiish) response to the 9/11 Bombings. To trace the origins to Saudi citizens would be intolerable.

Somehow, an invasion of something in the region seemed the righteous and masculine thing to do for leading Americans who were looking to consolidate post-Cold War global hegemony everywhere, but especially the Middle East. The confidence of the Bush presidency was supreme. But as Ali says, “the problem was not lack of funds but the Western state-building project itself, by its nature an exogenous process” that “bore no relation to the realities on the ground.” (p.106).

Warring factions, shifting alliances, the incomptence and corruption of the Karzai regime installed by the US, all this and more was kept from reporters or, we may guess, most did not want to know. The billions of dollars of aid never reached ordinary Afghanis, quite the reverse: the rich became richer while the poor suffered more and more deprivations. The NGOs, swarming but taking their orders from afar, living within heaquarters and constructed neighborhoods with no relation to the rest of the country, soon had to hire mercernaries to protect then when they ventured outward.

The cries of “Victory” could be heard far away, as press releases and statements to Congress, but back in Afghanistan itself, only by those on the take. The Taliban grew its fresh supply of fighters from a population desperately alienated and eager for revenge.

It is a gloomy note, if not a large portion of the book, to learn once more that Obama the peace candidate (of sorts), who could have ended the Afghanistan farce as soon as he gained the presidency, was not the peace president by a long run. Afghanistan was only one continuing spectacular blunder for the first no-white chief executive in the Oval Office and Colin Powell had already marked the path of empire-defense. The Obama administration’s choreographed execution of Osama Bin Laden and the mysterious burial of him at sea, the misuse of presidential authority to ramp up war in the district, this time in Libya, the discounting of any contrary intelligence—all this can only bring dismay to those who hoped for better from Democrats. Viewed differently, perhaps Obama’s own failures, plus Trump’s eagerness to get out of Afghanistan, made the final moves inevitable.

It is a less gloomy note, really a sidebar comment by Tariq Ali, to be reminded that the biggest antiwar demonstrations in history, within the millions in Europe and the UK alone, emerged as the US prepared to pounce upon a hapless Iraq. This peace movement was not successful but it was not in vain. We can, we must, mobilize again and again.


Paul Buhle is a retired historian, and co-founder, with Scott Molloy, of an oral history project on blue collar Rhode Islanders.

The Politics of Crypto

BY THOMAS KNAPP

NOVEMBER 15, 2021

In a series of tweets on November 9, “serial technology entrepreneur” Dave Troy outlines his view of cryptocurrency as “an ideologically-driven attack on the legitimacy of fiat currency, the @federalreserve, and the incumbent financial system,” and “the sequel to the January 6th” Capitol riot.

Let’s dispense with the latter charge first: There’s no merit to it whatsoever.

Cryptocurrency came into existence years before Trumpism was so much as a gleam in the Republican Party’s eye, and was conceived in large part as a method of separating money and state.

The Capitol riot, on the other hand, was no more than a tawdry tantrum of preference over which tyrant was entitled to crack the whip of government over the “incumbent financial system.”

In short, the Capitol rioters have far more in common with Dave Troy than with Satoshi Nakamoto, Bitcoin’s pseudonymous creator.

Troy is partly right, though, in claiming that cryptocurrency constitutes “an ideologically-driven attack on the legitimacy of fiat currency” in general and on the Federal Reserve itself.

That doesn’t mean that the many people involved in cryptocurrency, from miners to exchange operators to individual holders, are all wild-eyed anarchist revolutionaries like me. Far from it. For the most part, they’re no different than any other class of investor, entrepreneur, or consumer. They see something of value and they want to profit from it, or at least make good use of it. For most of them, it’s no more ideological than buying a share of Apple or a loaf of bread.

But for us ideologues, yes, the purpose of cryptocurrency is to seize control of money from the political class and distribute that control widely among free markets and individual people. That would be a good thing, not a bad thing, and to understand why we need look no further than the current worries over inflation.

America’s central bankers claim that recent inflation — supposedly annualizing to more than 6% at the moment, but probably much higher — is “transitory,” while politicians either claim confusion as to its cause or attribute it to convenient distractions.

Inflation happens when the money supply increases faster than the production of goods and services for purchase with that money. Period. Rising prices aren’t inflation, they’re just a symptom of inflation.

The Fed has spent the last two years magically creating new dollars out of thin air far faster than the economy can absorb those dollars with production of goods and services to sell.

Why? So that Congress can borrow those magical dollars and spend them on whatever the political class happens to want … in the process, reducing the value of the dollars you earned with actual productive work.

While it’s a stretch to claim that cryptocurrency is immune to government manipulation, it’s at least immune to arbitrary creation by government. Cryptocurrency makes it harder for the politicians to steal from you. That’s why the political class hates and fears it.

Giving government control of money was one of our worst mistakes. Cryptocurrency is how we’re correcting that mistake.


Thomas L. Knapp is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

Making Cannabis Safe for Capital

BY FRED GARDNER
NOVEMBER 12, 2021


California NORML organized a celebration/symposium on November 5, 25 years to the day that California voters passed Proposition 215, the ballot initiative that legalized marijuana for medical use. The purpose of the all-day event, according to CA NORML director Dale Gieringer, was “to record the history before the people that made it are all gone.” The venue was perfect —the General’s Residence at Fort Mason, which commands a fabulous view of the Bay and North Beach. There were five panels covering aspects of the sprawling history —the last years of Prohibition, The Campaign/Implementation, Doctors/Dispensaries, Legal/Prisoners, and The Present/The Future. More than 200 pot partisans and erstwhile activists heard 35 speakers tell their tales. There was so much to say that breaks between the sessions were called off.

The show began with a video welcome from Attorney General Rob Bonta. Introducing the clip, Gieringer described Bonta as “one of the state officials who have done so much over the years to help make Prop 215 actually work.” That blunt assertion was antithetical to the POV of Dennis Peron, the prime mover, who made futile trips to Sacramento in the years after 215 passed to testify against the “enabling legislation” by which Democratic politicians from State Sen. John Vasconcellos to Jerry Brown to Gavin Newsom and Rob Bonta have effectively modified the measure. According to Dennis, all that was needed to make Prop 215 work was for Law Enforcement to respect the letter and spirit of the law.

A co-author who agreed with Dennis, Dr. Tod Mikuriya, has been gone since 2007. So the Prop 215 origin story presented at Fort Mason was one-sided, except for a video statement by Dennis that his friend Davie Smith recorded in late ’95.

Bonta, 49, is a handsome, soccer-playing Yalie, very well-liked by our two mutual acquaintances. (His wife just got elected to his old seat in my Assembly District, running as a “progressive.” She spent $1 million to edge out a Democratic Socialist.) Bonta claims and deserves credit for passing the legislation on which the current tax-and-regulate scheme rests. In 2015 the Assembly passed his “Medical Marijuana Regulation and Safety Act” (MMRSA, pronounced “mersa”). No physicians were involved in the drafting process, obviously, or the politicos wouldn’t have called it by the name of a deadly pathogen (MRSA, Methicillin-Resistant Staphylococcus aureus). Mersa consisted of three separate bills, each, according to Bonta, addressing a problem that supposedly stemmed from Proposition 215. His three bills work in concert with the Adult Use of Marijuana Act (AUMA, rhymes with trauma). The complex scheme imposes a 15% excise tax on cannabis that must be paid by all users —as if it cannabis really medicine after all! (Prescription meds are not taxed anywhere in the US except Illinois, where the rate is 1%. In almost all states, over-the-counter meds are taxed at the sales tax rate, which in progressive California is 7.25%, the highest in the nation.)

Soon after AUMA took effect in 2018 it became apparent that high taxes were driving consumers away from licensed sellers. Bonta introduced a bill to reduce the excise tax to 11%, but his fellow legislators, instantly addicted to the extra revenue, voted it down. As AG he has been going after illicit growers and vendors. He proudly announced in his Fort Mason video that the Campaign Against Marijuana Planting had recently eradicated “nearly 1.2 million cannabis plants that were grown illegally.” To some in the audience the once dreaded thwump thwump thwump of choppers has become a welcome sound, and the formerly disdained Camo Buddies are rappelling down to save the environment. “The wheel of the law turns,” wrote Uncle Ho, “What could be more natural?”

The first panel was called “The Lead-up to Prop 215.” Gieringer recounted how in 1994 and ’95, medical marijuana bills had passed the state legislature and then been vetoed by Gov. Pete Wilson. These bills would have applied only to patients suffering from AIDS, cancer, multiple sclerosis, and glaucoma. Dr. Mikuriya scornfully called them “the short-list initiatives.” After Wilson’s second veto, activists meeting at Dennis Peron’s San Francisco Cannabis Buyers’ Club drafted a ballot initiative that could not be vetoed or (it was assumed) weakened by the state legislature. They dubbed it “The Compassionate Use Act of 1996.”

Creating the wording was a truly collective process, with Gieringer, Dennis, Mikuriya, and attorney Bill Panzer playing key roles. Valerie Corral, an epilepsy patient who grew her own medicine in Santa Cruz, insisted that the right to cultivate be specified. Valerie was on the “Lead-up” panel but didn’t take credit for her crucial contribution. Later in the day Pebbles Trippet would acknowledge her role.

At one point three women in nuns’ habits came in and stood against a nearby wall. The garb looked authentic but not much worn, and at a quick glance (it’s rude to stare) they all-seemed 30-something behind their masks. They could have been Bay Area gals repurposing their Halloween outfits or they could have been real nuns from Holy Names, the Oakland college at which George “I Guarantee It” Zimmer, president of the Men’s Wearhouse, had funded a chemistry lab with a plaque honoring Dr. Mikuriya. After a while the three took seats to my right. When a speaker expressed his and “our” great love and respect for “the plant,” I heard myself saying, “So we grow her under lights and deprive her of sexual fulfillment.” The nearest nun cracked up. I asked politely, “Are you real sisters?” She said yes, but not from the order of Holy Names. I didn’t know what to believe.

The second panel, “Taking it to the Streets: The Prop 215 Campaign,” featured the Soros-funded professionals who took over the leadership from Dennis in the early months of 1996. (The usurpers took it to the streets by hiring a professional signature-gathering firm.) Soros’s lieutenant for drug policy reform, Ethan Nadelmann, and Santa Monica PR pro Bill Zimmerman laid out the Capital-H History that someday will inform Ken Burns’s inevitable Marijuana documentary.

I started muttering audibly. Leif Erikson, MD, was sitting in front of me. I figured he wouldn’t find my jive objectionable because he knew the real story. Which is…

By January, 1996, it had become clear that Dennis’s network of volunteers could not come up with enough signatures to place the initiative on the ballot. Nadelmann notified Bay Area activists that he’d arrange the financing and, as a quid pro quo, replace Dennis as campaign manager. They assented. Then, to allay Soros’s fears that he’d be seen as a carpetbagger (which he was), Nadelmann arranged a $105,000 contribution from George Zimmer, . Soros then came through with $350,000, Peter Lewis of Progressive Insurance with $300,000, John Sperling of Phoenix University and other private colleges, $100,000, and Laurence Rockefeller (!) $50,000.

In April both Zimmerman and Dennis submitted ballot arguments in support of Prop 215 for inclusion in the Voter’s Handbook. It was Secretary of State Bill Jones. a Republican politician active in the No-on-215 campaign, who selected Zimmerman’s ballot arguments. These would subsequently be interpreted by judges to weaken the law passed by the voters. The initiative was written, Panzer says, as “a bar to prosecution.” But the ballot argument that Zimmerman drafted for San Francisco District Attorney Terence Hallinan to sign would turn the new law into “an affirmative defense,” meaning the cops could keep arresting and the DAs could keep charging people with cultivation, distribution, and even possession. Only then, as a defendant, could a medical user cite their doctor’s approval. (Pro-cannabis MDs often had to take time off to confirm their diagnoses in court as a result of the “Yes” ballot argument.”

Years later I asked Hallinan why he had signed the ballot argument. He said he assumed whatever Zimmerman wrote was right on because “We go back to the DuBois Clubs” (a youth group set up by the Communist Party in the 1950s as a recruiting mechanism). I never wrote about this because the only headline I could think of was “The Commie Conspiracy to Weaken Prop 215.”

Prop 215 was well ahead in the polls when Nadelzimm took over the campaign. A statewide survey in June ’95 by David Binder Associates had put the margin of support at 60-40. The opposition was led by an over-confident Attorney General Lungren and other Republican politicians and law enforcement officials who assumed the American people would buy their War-on-Drugs propaganda forever. Their strategy was to make the vote a referendum on Dennis Peron and the San Francisco Cannabis Buyers Club.

On Sunday morning August 4, about 100 agents from the California Bureau of Narcotics Enforcement, supervised by Senior Assistant Attorney General John Gordnier, raided 1444 Market Street. Simultaneously, five smaller BNE squads raided the homes of Buyers Club staff members in and around the city. The raiders wore black uniforms with BNE shoulder patches. They seized 150 pounds of marijuana, $60,000 in cash, 400 growing plants, plus thousands of letters of diagnosis that citizens had brought from their doctors and left on file at the club.

Members kept streaming by in the days after the bust and expressed their dismay and anxiety as they stood outside the closed front door, with its big red cross and heart painted on the plate glass. Many went across the Bay and joined the newly formed Oakland Cannabis Cooperative. Several San Francisco churches began serving as dispensaries. New clubs were launched in the Mission District (Flower Power) and at Dennis’s old location at Church and Market (CHAMP —Cannabis Helping Alleviate Medical Problems).

Dennis considered opening the club in defiance of the court order. He was dissuaded by attorney J. David Nick, who thought he could get the terms of the shutdown modified in Superior Court by promising to tighten up the admissions procedures.

Bill Zimmerman went so far as to urge the northern California ACLU chapter not to file an amicus brief on Dennis’s behalf. “Every time I debate Brad Gates,” said Zimmerman, referring to the Orange County Sheriff, a No-on-215 leader, “he always begins by saying, ‘This bill was written by a dope dealer from San Francisco,’ and emphasizes the looseness with which the Cannabis Buyers Club was run.” Zimmerman said he had developed an effective counter: “If Prop 215 were law, we wouldn’t need such clubs.”

Why, I asked Dennis, had he come up so short on the original signature drive? “I think I underestimated the climate of fear,” he said. “People think twice before they sign a petition that involves drugs. It’s like the McCarthy period —people worry if their name will go down on some list, if they’ll lose their job. Where are the liberals who will stand up and say, ‘This has gone too far?”

The liberal who stood up was Garry Trudeau. On Monday, Sept. 30 the Chronicle, the LA Times, and many other papers in California ran a strip in which Zonker’s friend Cornell says, “I can’t get hold of any pot for our AIDS patients. Our regular sources have been spooked ever since the Cannabis Buyers’ Club in San Francisco got raided…”

Attorney General Lungren, fearing the impact these strips would have on the Prop 215 campaign, urged the newspaper publishers who carry Doonesbury to spike the entire set. “Alternatively,” he suggested in a letter to the media owners, “your organization should consider running a disclaimer side-by-side with the strips which states the known facts related to the Cannabis Buyers Club.”

Lungren provided an op-ed piece stating the facts as determined by his BNE investigators. The club “Sold marijuana to teenagers. Sold marijuana to adults without doctors’ notes. Sold marijuana to people with fake doctors’ notes using phony doctors names and in some cases written on scrap paper. Allowed many small children inside the club where they were exposed for lengthy periods of time to second-hand marijuana smoke. Sold marijuana to people whose stated ailments included vaginal yeast infections, insomnia, sore backs and colitis —hardly terminal diseases. Sold marijuana in amounts as large as two pounds, greatly exceeding the club’s ‘rules.’”

Lungren called a press conference for Tuesday, Oct. 1, to reveal some of the evidence that had been assembled against Peron and the San Francisco Cannabis Buyers Club. During the question-and-answer session he got irritated by a question about Doonesbury. “Skin flushed and voiced raised, Attorney General Dan Lungren went head-to-head with a comic strip Tuesday…” is how Robert Salladay began his Oakland Tribune story. Don Asmussen in the SF Chronicle lampooned “Lungren’s War on Comics.” The New York Times devoted two full columns to the brouhaha, including a quote from Peron: “Crybaby Lungren… I think he’s just gone off the deep end. Waaa!”

According to the polls, a gradual decline in support for Prop 215 ended Oct. 1. Lungren had Peron arrested Oct. 5 on criminal charges that included conspiracy to distribute marijuana —one more effort to make the vote a referendum on this infamous San Francisco pot dealer. Press conferences to denounce Prop 215 were called by Drug Czar Barry McCaffrey and Joseph Califano of the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University (who flew out to San Francisco to publicize a misleading poll). Former presidents Ford, Carter and Bush released a letter calling a No-on-215 vote. Senators Boxer and Feinstein were also opposed, as was Gov. Gray Davis (all Democrats). The very popular former Surgeon General C. Everett Koop carried the No-on-215 message in the final ad campaign.

Proposition 215 passed on November 5, 1996, with 56% of the vote.


Fred Gardner is the managing editor of O’Shaughnessy’s. He can be reached at fred@plebesite.com