He does not see the MHD decision as being pronuclear at the expense of coal. “In fact, we were trying to make coal and nuclear developments a joint effort,” he says. “We knew that nuclear energy by itself
needed nuclear
and
coal.”
MHD lost out, according to Conway, for several reasonsânone of them having anything to do with the technical performance of MHD generators.
First, the coal industry itself was “terribly fragmented” by battles between labor and management. As a result, there was no unified position from the coal industry backing MHD as a user of the nation's most abundant fuel.
Second, according to Conway, “When you get to the big bucks that hardware requires, you reach a natural checkpoint.” The plans for an MHD demonstration plant were competing with requests for expensive new “atom-smashing” particle accelerators for high-energy physics experiments. The accelerators got the funding.
Most important, though, was Sporn's sudden departure. “Sporn was a hardheaded engineer,” Conway recalls, “like a Rickover.” Once the program lost his “drive and authority,” the decision-makers in Washington lost confidence in MHD.
Princeton University's Jonathan C. Coopersmith, in his 1978 analysis of the MHD programs in the United States and Soviet Russia, concluded:
Exactly why the [MHD] project was not approved by the government is not clear. The enthusiasm for nuclear power ⦠undoubtedly had a great deal to do with the lack of similar enthusiasm for coal in government circles. Funding constraints imposed by Johnson's Great Society programs and the Vietnam War also had a negative impact ⦠.
As the sixties staggered to their end under the burden of Vietnam and civil unrest, there was a general decline in government support of research
and development. Hardly anyone in Washington, or anywhere else in the nation, would back a new energy technology. The Yom Kippur War, the Arab oil embargo, and the energy crisis were less than five years away. Protests and demonstrations against nuclear power plants were already beginning; the Three Mile Island fiasco was ten years in the future.
Because he was a corporate vice-president and member of the Avco board of directors, Kantrowitz could keep his MHD program inching along on corporate funds. But the kind of money needed to build the pilot plant could be found only in Washington. No private investors were willing to take the risk, and corporations that were already heavily involved in building conventional power generators saw no incentive in helping to develop competition for their existing products.
Researchers at Westinghouse and General Electric maintained comparatively low-level efforts in MHD, and several universities such as Stanford and Tennessee carried on MHD studies.
Kantrowitz and fellow Avco Corporation board member George Allen found a sympathetic ear in Clark Clifford, a longtime Washington “insider” who had served briefly as Johnson's Secretary of Defense after Robert McNamara left the Cabinet.
“We told him MHD would be good for the country,” Kantrowitz remembers, “but no private company could justify risking the money to develop it.”
Clifford began “knocking on doors” in Washington. The only one that opened was that of Senator Mike Mansfield, Democrat from Montana and majority leader of the Senate. Montana is a state that is rich in coal but poor in water resources. MHD is an energy system that could burn Montana's coal without using up its scarce water.
“I don't know how Mansfield reached the decision
that he would grab on to it,” says Kantrowitz. “But he made the decision that he wanted MHD for Montana.”
Suddenly the obscure Office of Coal Research, buried deep within the Department of the Interior, began funding MHD. The budget rose quickly from a few hundred thousand dollars to some $70 million per year by the mid-1970s.
But the money was not being spent on Kantrowitz's dream of a pilot plant. Every private and university laboratory engaged in MHD research lined up for a piece of the pie, and the funding was dutifully parceled out to government labs and private companies âincluding Avco Everettâand to universities such as Stanford, Tennessee, and the University of Montana, where a Mansfield-inspired MHD Institute and testing facility were built.
In the words of one disgruntled researcher, “They were spending more on MHD than ever, and getting less results.” The program had no real goal, no focus.
“By that time the estimates of the cost of a pilot plant were $200 to $300 million,” Kantrowitz says. “Nobody had the courage to undertake that risk.”
Undaunted, Kantrowitz urged Mansfield to push for an MHD program that would produce megawatts instead of research reports.
The senator told Kantrowitz to write out a plan of action and Kantrowitz did, on a single sheet of paper. “I said we should build a pilot plant, and that's it,” Kantrowitz recalls. The plan was enacted by the Congress, tacked onto another bill as a rider, and in 1976 Mansfield personally presented it to President Gerald Ford for his signature.
But even that failed to produce an MHD pilot plant. There were no teeth in the law. “I was stupid enough to think that if the Congress passed the MHD action plan, it would result in action,” says
Kantrowitz ruefully. “It did absolutely nothing.” The Department of Energy has been “studying” the plan for nearly ten years.
By 1978 it was Kantrowitz's turn to face mandatory retirement. He left Avco Everett and accepted a professorship at Dartmouth. “It's very painful to retire when you've still got things to do,” he says.
When the Reagan Administration swept into Washington early in 1981, one of its avowed aims was to dismantle the Department of Energy and all of its programs.
But the new head of Avco Everett, R. W. (“Dutch”) Detra, and Vincent J. Coates, director of Special Projects, began a campaign with MHD enthusiasts in Montana and elsewhere. Working with congressmen and senators who opposed dissolving the Department of Energy, they were able to keep MHD funded at about $30 million per year through the first Reagan Administration.
“The Massachusetts congressional delegation has been very helpful,” Coates says. “Particularly Nicholas Mavroules, Silvio Conte, and Edward P. Boland.” Congressmen from Montana and Tennessee, where MHD research efforts are under way, have also staunchly supported the program. So has powerful Senator John Stennis of Mississippi, who believes energy technology is vital to national defense.
Like ancient Gaul, the Department of Energy's MHD program is divided into three major parts. Avco Everett is concentrating on the MHD channel, the pipe at the heart of the generator that extracts electrical energy from the ultra-hot stream of gas flowing through it. TRW Corporation's Energy Technology Division in Redondo Beach, California, is developing special coal burners. And Babcock & Wilcox is building boilers that can take the still-hot gas coming out of an MHD generator and make steam
that will run a conventional generator “downstream” of the MHD system.
Robert Kessler is Avco Everett's vice-president for energy technology, head of the MHD effort. He sees a pilot plant being built by 1995.
“The Department of Energy plan calls for retrofitting an existing power plant with an MHD system in the early to mid-1990s,” says Kessler.
But privately, many scientists who have worked on MHD nearly all their lives admit that even that dateâtwentyâfive years later than Kantrowitz's original estimationâmay not be met. William D. Jackson, the “J” of HMJ Corporation, a small Washington-based energy research and development company, says, “A pilot plant in the early 1990s is just flat optimistic.” He believes that DOE's current program of $30 million per year is far too small; $100 million per year is needed, Jackson claims.
Kessler says, “What we're trying to achieve is reliable operation of MHD equipment at sizes that are practical for commercial power generation. At this stage of the game, efficiency is not so important as predictability, economics, and reliability.” He lays heavy emphasis on reliability.
Jackson agrees. “They've got to build something that a utility company would allow into one of its power plants!”
The DOE plan calls for an MHD generator to be installed in an existing power plant as a “topping unit.” That is, the MHD system will start the process of converting heat to electricity. As the hot gas leaves the MHD generator, after having surrendered as much as fifty megawatts of electrical energy, it will be fed into the special boilers that will raise steam for the plant's conventional turbogenerators, which will then make even more electricity from the same original coal-fired heat input.
DOE has already indicated that it expects the MHD program's industrial participants to share the costs of the pilot plant. The government will not foot the bill on tax money alone. Joseph McElwain, chairman and chief executive officer of Montana Power Company, has offered one of his utility's power plants as the site for the demonstration retrofit. But the other industrial partners are looking askance at the idea of cost-sharing.
“It could take twenty years before the money invested in a demonstration plant shows any profit,” says Avco Everett chief Detra. “Can a corporation afford to tie up millions of dollars for such a long time?”
Kantrowitz now serves as one of fifteen advisors to the MHD Industrial Forum, an organization created by the companies involved in MHD development. To him, all this should have happened twenty years ago.
“If we had built a pilot plant in the sixties,” he insists, “it wouldn't have workedâat first. Then we'd figure out why it didn't work, we'd fix it, and it would have worked.” A pilot plant in the 1990s will go through the same evolution. “It won't work. You'll have to fix it. What you might hope for is that you have a larger background of knowledge from which to fix it.”
Kessler almost agrees. “If they'd built the pilot plant back in the sixties, we'd be ahead of where we are today.”
But Jackson disagrees. If a pilot plant had been built in the 1960s and failed, “it would have killed MHD,” he says. “Just absolutely killed it.”
Some of the scientists and engineers involved in the program today are deeply pessimistic. “The only kinds of experiments we do are the kinds that entail no risks,” says one of them. “That's no way to make progress.”
“The MHD program has become a minor pork barrel,” says another. “Its real aim is to satisfy the political forces that exist in Massachusetts, Montana, and Tennessee.”
“We're no closer to a pilot plant now than we were eighteen years ago,” Kantrowitz asserts flatly.
Perhaps the gloomiest statement came from an engineer who has worked almost his entire professional life on MHD. “I used to hope to see MHD become practical and useful in my lifetime. Now I don't think it will. I think I've been wasting my time.”
“From the technical point of view there's no reason why MHD can't become commercially viable,” says Richard Rosa, the man who built the first working MHD generator, at Avco Everett in 1959. Now a professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Montana, at Bozeman, Rosa is still carrying out MHD research and consulting with the nearby MHD Institute at Butte.
The annual Washington budget battle, however, “really tears up the program,” according to Rosa. “Half the year everybody's on hold.” He believes that the utility industry's bad experiences with technological innovations such as nuclear power is discouraging the industry from investing the money required to make a commercial success of MHD.
So the program is totally dependent on federal funding, with “a crisis every year.”
The fear of massive budget deficits now pervading Washington led David Stockman's Office of Management and Budget to “zero out” MHD in the fiscal year 1986 federal budget. This was not the first time MHD has been dropped from the White House's budget plans. Similar efforts to stop all government funding of MHD have been successfully fought before. But there is more pressure now than ever to get the government out of the MHD business.
The House of Representatives Science and Technology Subcommittee on Energy Development and Applications approved a $28-million authorization for MHD. Coates believes the pro-MHD forces in Congress may eke out a budget somewhere between $25 and $30 million. But there is pressure from the White House to drop the program, once and for all.
“At best, we'll be able to keep the program alive from year to year,” Coates says. “But as long as we have this polite antagonism between government and private industry, the U.S. runs the risk of losing its lead in technology to countries where government and industry work together.”
Japan, China, and the Soviet Union are pursuing their own MHD programs, based on the work originally done in the United States, Coates points out. “We may have to buy MHD generators from them,” he says.
In September 1983 Kantrowitz was invited to Moscow to receive the Faraday Medal, presented by UNESCO to him and Soviet scientist A. E. Sheindlin for their contributions to MHD.
Ironically, he never went to accept the medal. As he was preparing to leave for Moscow, the Soviets shot down Korean Air Lines flight 007. Kantrowitz canceled his trip. UNESCO sent the medal to his home in New Hampshire.