Interview with Chauncey Starr, by Lora Oehlberg, June 2006

Chauncey Starr is the founder of the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) in Palo Alto, CA. After working on the Manhattan Project during World War II, he became a leader in developing nuclear power. During the 1960s while the Dean of the School of Engineering at UCLA, he authored a groundbreaking paper on risk-benefit analysis. In 1974 he founded the EPRI in Palo Alto, a non-profit research organization which objectively and independently conducts research for electric power utilities.

OEHLBERG: What are your current projects?

STARR: I'm working on three projects at the moment, the biggest one being a book on how to do decision making for the future. It's very easy to do historical analysis of the past, analysis of what happened and why, but to make a decision for the future, the mental process is very different. There aren't very many who've written about it since there aren't very many people who have been thinking very deeply about it. I've been writing it up analytically so it can be taught, or at least be read, by people who as part of their functions do future planning, both in the small sense (deciding where to go to school) and in the large sense (president of a country or of a company). It is the essence of all research and developmentÑworking on something that is always supposed to be ready for the future. It turns out that there is an analytical process of doing this and a creative process.

OEHLBERG: What are the biggest dangers associated with nuclear power?

STARR: There are real dangers, and then there are dangers which are perceived but not real. You have to remember the history of nuclear power. I'm biased; I have to tell you by way of explanation of the Manhattan District. I was in charge of the development of the Electromagnetic Separation of Uranium-235. All the best engineers or among the best engineers in the country were pulled together in that project to produce the atomic bomb. A fascinating amount of technical and applied science was done without restriction of funds and with time pressure. When the war was over, the great majority of people, myself included, who worked on the project, felt there was an enormous potential for nuclear power.

We had developed the actual ability to use the first new radical energy form ever made available to the human race not easily found in nature. And we were excited, that was just the point. I became one of the workers dedicated to taking nuclear power for civilian purpose, and I built an organization to allow that, supported by the Atomic Energy Association and the government for more than 20 years.

My bias is that since everything in that field is work in which I had a hand, my confidence at being able to manage and control them is extremely high. From my point of view, it's probably the safest of all the energy forms we have. And the reason is very simple: of all the forms that produce effluence, this is the only one where you can capture the effluence (radioactive output). We worry about putting it underground or in cement casts, but it's the only one where you can package it; you can't do that with anything else.

Nuclear power came out of wartime, came out of destruction, and carries with it the image of being half-blessing and half-devilish, depending on which face you look at. For historical reasons, very complicated sociologically, it has this problem of overcoming this image of potential danger.

OEHLBERG: How do you view the threat of Nuclear Proliferation?

STARR: Most of nuclear power is going to get used for civilian purposes. You need very, very little fuel to make nuclear weapons. That's why it's such a wonderful topic to be attacked. One commercial fuel loading can give you enough weapons materials for several bombs, so there's no comparison. The military program requires very few nuclear reactors. The commercial programs require thousands around the world. The issue is not how a civilian power plant would be used, the issue is that the commercial power plants do not use fuel that could be used for weapons very well. You could make a poor weapon that doesn't have a high probability of working very successfully using material from civilian power. But primarily, a weapons plant is small, and is run by the militaryÉ In any country where you have a civilian power system and it's a big part of the electrical supply, you're not going to be able to cut it off and bypass the civilian operation to turn it into a weapons produce.

The practical point is that a weapons system and a civilian system are operationally not consistent. Any country that goes in for one will separately go in for the other if they want it. The one thing they have in common are the nuclear engineers. The technical knowledge that goes into one is similar to the technical knowledge that goes into the other. That's the one commonality.

OEHLBERG: How and why was EPRI founded?

STARR: I organized the setup of the system by which EPRI works 30 years ago. It as an organization that has two philosophical approaches and one technical one. Our first philosophical one was that we could not be a spokesman for the electric utility industry. This is not a minor issue since they were the ones who had to support EPRI. It took me actually several years to convince the electric utility industry that it was worth their while to be as objective as possible, to consider all sides of every issue.

The other philosophical principle one was that we would discuss the unsolved social problems as well as the ones that had been solved. That's very difficult to do, incidentally, to provide the whole picture, even though half the picture is unsolved or raises social questions. I'll give you an example: air conditioning, you know, is a direct result in the last 50 years of the low cost of electricity. Air conditioning of the home or apartment house is a very inefficient process. For example, in New York you can see six-story buildings with air conditioners on the edge of every window. The government was faced with setting regulations from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) for home air conditioners because the smaller they get, the more inefficient they are. The issue that comes up is: is it better to have a more efficient air conditioner that costs more than a low-cost inefficient one on the theory that the low-cost inefficient one would be more available to people in the lowest economic sector? That's a social issue. We described that issue but we did not take a side. But presenting that issue was a radical thing at the time since general purveyors of equipment didn't go into the social aspects of what they wanted you to buy.

OEHLBERG: What safety devices in Nuclear Power Plants do you think are particularly clever?

STARR: Well, the biggest single problem that nuclear power stations have that is absolutely unique from every other power source is when you shut down a nuclear power plant, you can't shut the power down to zero. By producing power you produce fission products, and these elements continue to radiate, even if they're not making large amounts of energy to collectÉ so these radioactive particles continue to turn out heat. When you press the button to shut it off, 10% of the heat continues to come out from the fission products (100 MW). That heat has to be taken care of; if you don't take care of it, it'll raise the temperature of the inside and melt down the interior.

In the years of working on nuclear power safety, a tremendous effort was put on the reserve cooling capacityÑpumps and outside water, etc. to get rid of that 10% of residual heat. The greatest thing that's happened in the last few years is that the engineers have devised a system of thermal convection that operates without any pumps and gets rid of excess heat by transfer to the atmosphere: a heat transfer system that dissipates this is in a big huge natural circulation system through the chimney. That's a subtle and complex system with no moving parts. For the first time we now have really proven techniques of getting rid of the one residual component, which in the past required calling fire engines or something of that sort to provide enough water to take care of the residual heat. But now we have one that requires no external power source.

OEHLBERG: How do you convince a Nuclear Power Plant to invest in safety technology? How much is safety worth?

STARR: There's two ways you do that. The easiest way is to do it by regulation. By regulation, you try to protect the public from the consequences of a bad technical choice. The Nuclear Regulatory Comission (NRC) was set up about 20 years after the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC )startedÉ it had a regulatory operation inside, but what you try to do is get something called a Òbest practiceÓ and you make it a rule that every nuclear plant follow these Òbest practicesÓ.

The other way is you convince the electric utilities and the plant designers that it's in their self-interest to turn out safe products or they'll have a hard time getting the public to accept it. You do both at the same time but not without a struggle. The regulators want to over-regulate (and as a result make everything very costly) and the utilities don't want to spend any money for what I call a Òdead investmentÓ. It's a poor word to useÉ it's like fire insurance being required by regulations for a fireproof house. The utilities therefore object to spending money unnecessarily for more safety precautions. The regulators insist on it. So you argue with both.

OEHLBERG: What made you first decide to look at Risk Analysis?

STARR: At UCLA I taught a graduate class, some of whose members are still around, and the whole class was devoted to this topicÉ We actually studied how much risk were people willing to take in actual activities in their lifestyle. People take risks skiingÉ I've broken three legs skiing, I know what it's like, but people still go skiing. But it's an expensive sport. We went around and looked at everything, like the regulations of the Department of Agriculture on insecticides. We looked at the cost, benefits, and the statistical risk of 10-20 years of any of these activities. We found that there were actual criteria and principles followed almost intuitively by each one of the groups.

People talk a lot about risk. They don't want it, but then when you ask how much they are willing to pay to get rid of it, the picture changes. And that's been measured too.

OEHLBERG: What are your current projects?

STARR: I'm working on three projects at the moment, the biggest one being a book on how to do decision making for the future. It's very easy to do historical analysis of the past, analysis of what happened and why, but to make a decision for the future, the mental process is very different. There aren't very many who've written about it since there aren't very many people who have been thinking very deeply about it. I've been writing it up analytically so it can be taught, or at least be read, by people who as part of their functions do future planning, both in the small sense (deciding where to go to school) and in the large sense (president of a country or of a company)É It is the essence of all research and developmentÑworking on something that is always supposed to be ready for the future. It turns out that there is an analytical process of doing this and a creative process.

OEHLBERG: What is the most dangerous thing you've done?

STARR: Going skiing. It's the only thing that's ever hurt me.

Copyright 2006 Ambidextrous Magazine, Inc.