Brittle Power- PARTS 1-3 (+Notes) - Natural Capitalism Solutions

202National Energy Securityany of these three types of aircraft is, for example, a light plane whose crashspeed is slower than that of a person in a parachute. 71Forgivingness is often a compromise with peak efficiency. A wire geodesicdome may be impressively “minimal” in how much volume it encloses withhow few pounds of wire, but that is little comfort if the removal of a singlewire causes the whole dome to collapse. An LNG tanker is unforgiving if (asappears to be the case) a single failure in its inner containment membrane cancause the entire hull to fail by brittle fracture. The particular design of a simplemechanical component can change a forgiving design into an unforgivingone, as in box-girder bridges, a style of construction once popular in Britain.The design techniques and structures (stiffened panels) that they use “aremaximally sensitive to imperfections in their manufacture.” 72 Therefore evena slight flaw or size deviation in the material can reduce the strength of a panelby a third or more. If one panel buckles, so do the rest. Such failures have costseveral deaths and hundreds of millions of dollars in property damage.Likewise, high-performance jet aircraft engines appear to be highly vulnerableto dust, such as that kicked up by nuclear explosions. This flaw might,in a nuclear attack, disable America’s fighters, bombers, cruise missiles, radaraircraft, and airborne command posts (including the President’s), 73 for thesame reason that the engines of aircraft which flew through the dust cloudfrom Mount St. Helens caught on fire. Yet simpler, more forgiving enginedesigns may in many cases entail little sacrifice in performance. 74Simplicity Some designs achieve “forgivingness” through simplicity—the elegantlyeconomical use of limited means. Simplicity is sometimes called “theunavoidable cost of reliability.” Generations of engineers have enshrined it inthe KISS principle (“Keep it simple, stupid”), the Fathy principle (“Don’t tryto improve on anything that works”), and its cowboy version (“If it ain’tbroke, don’t fix it”). Gall states among the principles of Systemantics:15. A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simplesystem that works.16. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched upto make it work. You have to start over, beginning with a simple working system.(Translation for computer programmers: Programs never run the first time.Complex programs never run.) 75Complexity breeds weird failure modes which cannot be foreseen, understoodeven in hindsight, or fixed. Nobody can see what is wrong. Simplicity, in contrast,provides what designers call “transparency”: anyone can see what is wrong.Many modern engineers, carried away by the sophistication of their designtools, forget that the more parts there are, the more can go wrong. Boeing-