Science Friday - Monumental And Invisible: How Infrastructure Works

Episode Date: November 15, 2023

Perhaps you’ve marveled at the engineering feats of the Golden Gate Bridge or the Hoover Dam. Maybe you’ve thought about how many train tracks run in and out of Grand Central Station. But it’s sometimes easy to forget just how important well-functioning infrastructure is in our day-to-day lives. Flip a light switch, and the light comes on. Wash a load of laundry and your clothes come out clean and fresh. Order pretty much anything on Amazon and it arrives two days later. It can be kind of boring. And that’s the good news. We like our infrastructure to be boring—that means it’s running well. Ira talks with Dr. Deb Chachra, author of the new book How Infrastructure Works: Inside the Systems that Shape Our World and professor of engineering at the Olin College of Engineering, about the role of infrastructure in our lives. To stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters. Transcripts for each segment will be available the week after the show airs on sciencefriday.com. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

A web of infrastructure supports our modern world. How do we keep it working? You know, if you go to the homepage of any major newspaper, I guarantee you there will be a few stories that, like it or not, relate to climate change and infrastructure. It's Wednesday, November 14th, and it's Infrastructure Week. Oops, I mean, it's Science Friday. I'm sci-fi producer Shishana Booksbound.

I'll admit I'm a total infrastructure nerd. You can sometimes find me ogling the massive machinery at the Red Hooker. shipping container port in Brooklyn. But it's sometimes easy to forget just how critical, well-functioning infrastructure is in our everyday lives. Ira Flato talks with the author of a new book about what it takes to make infrastructure work and keep working. My next guest has thought a lot about the role of infrastructure in our lives, both big and small, and how we're going to have to adjust our embedded infrastructure to climate change. Let me introduce her. Dr. Deb, Excuse me, Dr. Deb Chachra, author of how infrastructure works inside the systems that shape our world

and Professor of Engineering at the Olin College of Engineering based in Needham, Massachusetts. Welcome to Science Friday. Thank you. I'm so happy to be here. Nice to have you. I want to let our listeners in on our secret. If they have some infrastructure they want to ask about or brag about or tell us something wrong about it, a bridge, a building, water systems, or maybe there's an infrastructure that's most, needs to be made. What do you think? One that's worn out, needs attention. Maybe you need something built from scratch. Give us a call. 844-724-8255-844-Sy-4-a-4-scy-talk or tweet us at

Cy-Fry. Deb, do you walk around like I do in Marvel at the infrastructure? Do you see? I have my entire life. And you actually hit up something really interesting, which is that these systems are simultaneously kind of in our field of view at Envi. moment of the day and we tend not to think about them or even see them. And those two things are simultaneously true. Yeah, that is true. Tell us why you decided to write this book now. I mean, what is it about our current moment that makes thinking about our infrastructure so critical? So I, you know, the idea of the book came because for about the last 10 years or so, I have been convincing my friends and my friends have been convincing me to go and look at various

pieces of infrastructure, including reservoirs and dams and the like. And I realized that when I did this, sort of two things came to mind. So one is that every system, no matter how cool it seemed from an engineering point of view, I realized that there was some kind of inequity baked into it. So if it's a city, it's where it gets its water from, if it's a power plant, it's like where the power plant is situated or what the pollution is. So that was one side of it. The other side of it is that I realize that we think of these as engineering systems, but also we understand that they're deeply social and political. So this is why we're so, you know, we think about Flint

or we think about Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria. So we're really aware of these two sides. And what I realized was that given my background as an engineering professor, I really saw them as the sort of the energy and the matter, the very basic science of them, as inextricably related to how they functioned on the social or political or even economic way. So that was kind of the impetus for how infrastructure works, right, how to put it together. And then the immediate impetus or the thing that I really

sort of dialed in while I was writing the book is, do you know the line about the best time to write, or so the best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago and the next best time is today? So for a long, long time, I thought the best time to have written this book was 20 years ago and the next best time was today. Because 20 years ago, you know, we are now, seeing the real impacts of climate change, we're sort of on this increasing exponential curve. And it was like, oh, you know, I wish I had put this together. Yeah.

But no one wanted to listen 20 years ago. We've been talking about it on this show forever. Right. And so, first of all, we sort of broadly, we all appreciate what the issue is now, right? If you open, you know, if you go to the homepage of any major newspaper, I guarantee you there will be a few stories that, like it or not, relate to climate change and infrastructure.

But the other thing that's really changed is that in the, the last, you know, 10 or 15 years, the technologies for renewable energy have really mature to the point where we can now see this pathway to a renewable future. And so had I written this book 20 years ago, those would have been in the future still. And it's like, here's the thing, it's like, we need to transform these systems, we need to decarbonize them. At some point in the future, it will be possible to do this. And writing it today, in the book coming out today,

it lands in a very different place because now I get to say, we need to transform these systems. Most of the energy we use, and therefore most of the carbon dioxide, the greenhouse gas emissions we produce, is used through these collective systems. We need to transform them because they are both how we contribute to climate change, but also they are deeply affected by anthropogenic climate change. And we now have the technology to see how that would be possible.

So it's a very, very different position to be in than if I had written it, you know, 20 years ago, even 10 years ago. Yeah, and you talk about lots of different things in the book, but actually the idea that infrastructures work with each other, lots of different infrastructures, and there's a need to cooperate among them, right? Yeah, the sort of the fundamental reality of all of these systems is that, and this is one of the ways in which they're technological as well as social,

is that they function because we, one, take them for granted. We just, you know, if we start something, we know, you know, if you bring a washing machine home, you know you're going to be able to plug it in, you know, you're going to have water, you know, you're going to have a drain for sewage. You know, modern washing machines might even be connected to the internet, right, that all of these systems just kind of exist and you can take them for granted. And that's made possible because we have this agreement that when we build a house, it will have in the U.S. 120-volt power, it will have, you know, this type of connector for water and sewage. So one is that sort of cooperation

that is the standards that just make systems work as a whole. And that cooperation, of course, is not just at the household level. It extends really at the global level, this idea of organizations around how are we going to do things, the sort of standards, but really practices, right, ways of doing things. And those are social agreements as much as technological agreements. So that's one of the ways in which these systems are inextricably, both technological and social and political.

Let's talk about one system that we love to talk about on the program. You talk about tracing water, water that comes into our tap all the way. You trace it all the way back to its source, and then where it goes when you're done with it, right? What did you learn when doing this exercise? So one of the things is that, well, it's okay. First of all, I should point out that I live in the Northeast where it rains a lot. Lots of water. And so water here is very different than water in the West.

And that's the thing that I knew before I started thinking about it more deeply. But now I really, really understand what that difference is. So living in the Northeast, living in a place like Boston or New York, our water comes from pretty nearby. It comes from surface reservoirs. And it is almost all of it is delivered by gravity to our houses. And it's, you know, then there's like a network. And I think of it as an artificial network of rivers and streams on top of or actually, I guess, underneath our cities. that instead of having just like a stream in creeks and rivulets that deliver it,

now it's actually sort of aqueducts and pipes that deliver it to our homes. And then the same thing in kind of mirror image is what collects all the sewage and takes it to a treatment plant and takes it out. And so one of the things that I thought was really surprising is I hadn't realized how much of it was just delivered by gravity alone. And it kind of makes sense because these systems in places like Boston and New York were built out in the 19th century. and they were built

because gravity did most of the work for you, right? If you built the dam and you built the reservoir and you built the aqueduct, then gravity would happily deliver. Built it a little higher and go downhill. That's right, yeah. So it's almost always uphill. So New York, it's up the Hudson Valley in San Francisco.

It's in the hatchetri reservoir. It's typically, and in fact, actually, I live in Boston, so my sewage stream plant is at sea level. It's on an island, or I guess now, no longer an island, on the harbor, right? So you basically take advantage of letting gravity do the work for you. Let me just remind everybody, quickly, this is Science Friday from WNYC Studios, talking with Dr. Deb Chattra, author of How Infrastructure Works.

Finish telling us how your infrastructure was working. So that's how it works in a place on the East Coast, but of course on the West Coast in California and the Western States, it takes a huge amount of energy to move the water around. And some of that energy is generated by the water itself. The water goes across many, many states. It's aqueducts that are hundreds of miles long. So it's a very different world in terms of how it was built and the kind of energy that's used. And that turns out to be a key piece of how we think about infrastructure, which is how do they use energy.

And different systems use it in different ways. Yes. And one thing I've always looked at when I look at where water, because I love that, you know, watching how water moves around. is the aqueducts, I think they're in California that move the water, they're not covered. I mean, how much water must evaporate from these things by the time they get to where they want to go? He's thinking about building the right kind of infrastructure.

And I think one of the things that we're sort of getting at here is that at the time they were built, that seemed like a perfectly reasonable idea. Yeah. Right? It's like, well, you know, we're going to lose a little bit of water to evaporation, but it's not worth making the effort to cover them. But this sort of gets at this idea that

in a world where our climate is changing and it's changing in unpredictable ways, we're suddenly revisiting these decisions. It's like, was that really, or not so much, was that the right idea at the time? But is like, is that the right idea moving into this uncertain future? And so those are the types of questions

that we're now facing for all of our infrastructure systems, which is as the landscape they're embedded in, changes as it gets hotter or drier or wetter or more liable to have forest fires, how does that change how we think about and how we build our infrastructural systems. We have to take a break in about a minute or so,

but this all sounds like money. Right. Isn't that at the bottom of how we might change things? People have to spend money on this. Will they for climate change? And that's not a question you can answer as an engineer, but it's a question that we talk about a lot

because whether you're going to be putting in new kinds of power plants. You're going to be switching to solar. You're going to be moving electricity around in a grid. All those questions are questions of money. And I want to get back to those because we have a lot of callers on the phone who are going to ask those kinds of questions. So let's take our break now and we'll get back and answer these questions by taking some of these great calls. Our number 844-724-8255-844 SciTalk. Stay with us. You can also tweet us. Yes, tweet us at SciFri. We'll try to get your question or your comment on the air that way. Stay with us. We'll be right back after this break.

This is, I'm talking with Dr. Deb Chattra, author of How Infrastructure Works Inside the Systems That Shape Our World. She's Professor of Engineering at Olin College of Engineering in Needham, Massachusetts. Stay with us. We'll be right back. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flito. In case you're just joining us, we're continuing our conversation with Dr. Deb Chatra,

author of how infrastructure works inside the systems that shape our world. lots of phone calls 844-724-8255 let's go to anthony in rochester new york hi anthony oh hi ira wow what a treat to be on science friday uh hi so my question was and it's more of just the thought because i know a lot of the answers but what is it that's keeping us from really achieving high speed rail i'm from rochester and new york cities are about you know 75 to 100 miles apart I'm from Albany, and getting from Rochester to Albany is just a nightmare in a car, or, you know, if you're daring to take the Amtrak from here to Rochester, I mean, you better be prepared for a one to two hour delay even longer because we don't own

the lines. They're corporately owned. So what can we do? Like, what, as I'm 30-8 years old, and I'm trying to get people involved in making change, And I just don't know what the actual roadblocks are. Good, good question. Deb, do you have an answer because they tried this experiment out in California, right, building a railroad from San Francisco to L.A.?

Not going so well. So, you know, it is really hard to build collective systems, right? It requires that we act to think and act collectively. And I think that we, particularly in the U.S., are a little bit out of practice for how to do this. everyone talks about, oh, we haven't really built anything new in, you know, 20 or 40 years. And it's like, oh, yeah, like that means that we are out of practice and how to do it, both in the social sense of how do we coordinate around it and even in the sort of practical, technological sense of how do we manage these types of engineering projects.

I, you know, I wish I had sort of a simple answer to like, why is it so hard to do this. And certainly, you know, I don't want to do a disservice to the many people who spend a lot of time and their career is working. policy by pretending I do. I understand that it is complicated. But I think one piece of it is people like you, Anthony, saying this is the thing that we want, right? This is the thing that we want to commit to, that we want the political will to make this kind of change. It's definitely good to be a key part of those changes happening. I live in Boston and I, you know, I love taking the train to New York. That is absolutely my preferred way to go down the corridor. And, you know, there really is the potential for this to be how we manage the train.

the sort of intercity mobility. And a chunk of how we're going to get there is people saying this is the thing we want. Yeah, yeah. This is something I would love to see. And other countries like China, which have wider open expanses where you don't have to elevate the railroad so high and go around people. They have done it. And if you ride those trains, you say, I want one back home. Tim in Anchorage.

Hi, welcome to Science Friday. Hi, Tim. Hello. Hi there. Sorry, there was a disconnect. Next, Sam calling from Alaska. Go ahead. For taking my call.

Yeah, so as there are many people across the country discussing hydrogen, I wanted to get the thoughts of yourself and Dr. Chandra on the prospects that you see for clean hydrogen and the need for development of infrastructure. And briefly, a comment here in Alaska, we are also having that discussion. I am sitting today close to Anchorage, Alaska, and by many standards, Alaska is fairly. remote from the lower 48 anyway, but we're also at the crossroads for international commerce for about nine and a half hours by air from about 90% of the developed world, and certainly just about halfway on the Great Circle Route for maritime transit with cargo going between Asia and North America. So we're preparing and having discussions for transition to hydrogen as one of the fuel or energy carriers in the future. Because you could move it around on ships and

things. Yeah. Well, what, Deb, what do you think? where hydrogen is sort of a stepchild of the energy carriers these days. Yeah, I mean, I think that, you know, fossil fuels are amazing. We use them for excellent reason, right? They have an incredible amount of energy density. That means that for a given amount of mass, we get a lot of usable energy out of them. They're really easy to transport and move around. And more than anything, however, we have, you know, a century and change of investment

in how to work with these systems and how, you know, to build out the, the systems that make it possible to, you know, drive across the country or fly around the planet and have fossil fuels available to fuel you where you go. So it's a little, it's kind of hard for us to wrap our brain around the fact that we are at the beginning of this new thing. And the beginning means that we're not, there are no sort of set, oh, well, this is how we're going to do it. This is what the pathway is going to be. We see this in kind of the early history of, say, electricity where, and we sort of see remnants of it with, you know, different power plugs in different places, right? That we try a bunch of different things and settled on a bunch of different

standards. And so I see decarbonizing as something very similar, that there's many, many different options and there's many different pathways, and we'll end up exploring different pathways to see which ones are the ones that work best for particular applications or in particular places. But it seems very likely that there will be a multiplicity of approaches to how to decarbonize things like fuel. Speaking of that, following that kind of thought, you talk lovingly in your book about the local nuclear power plant you visited as a kid. Has your fondness for nuclear power continued as you learn more about it as an engineer? And should nuclear power play a bigger role in our future energy needs?

So one of the ways in which I think about infrastructure is that it connects us to the people who live around us. And so you mentioned being in a city, and we talked about how if you live in a city, you share your clean water with everyone who lives in the same place as you. And you made the collective decision to build out a reservoir and aqueducts and bring the water. And you build that out for the people who are going to live where you are in the future as well, right? Like we are benefiting from the systems that were built, you know, 50 or 100 or even more years before now. And so when you think about nuclear in the context of not just the present, but the people who are going to live in this place into the future, then it really sort of puts that into a perspective of, okay, nuclear has these sort of long-term hazards that we want to think about. We want to mitigate those harms or we want to manage those harms. We don't want to just dump them, just like we don't want to dump them into people who live in a different place.

We don't want to dump them onto the people who are going to live in this spot in the future. And so I think, I mean, I think that nuclear has an enormous amount of potential. I also think that we need to think very hard about how we would manage and mitigate the risks so that we do not just sluff the problem onto another generation or many future generations. Of course, the trend of nuclear is to go really small, right? And small little nuclear power plants that are kind of local. Right. But that still doesn't, they are local, they are geographically local.

but they are still temporarily extended, right? They still have concerns that extend forward into the future. And as you point out in your book, there's inequality built into some of these big, important, infrastructure systems like Niagara Falls, right? Tell us about the history of Niagara Falls. Sure. And so one of the things that I realized

when I started digging into these systems is that there's really inequality built into virtually all of them. And so one way of thinking about this is that these systems bring resources to where we use them. And so, you know, it's like, again, if you just think of water as sort of a very basic idea,

it's like, if you live in a city, it brings water to where you are. It brings it very efficiently and well, and you benefit from it. Well, any system that can bring that to you also can take it away from somewhere else, and it also means that you can displace the harms to a different place.

So one of the reasons why the, so Niagara Falls, downstream in Niagara Falls, there are two power plants, one of which is for New York City, and it was built by Robert Moses, which I'm sure was a familiar name to many of the listeners. Infamous. The infamous, Robert Moses. And so in order to build that power station, Moses went to the Supreme Court to break a treaty obligation to the Tuscarora tribe to take over part of the land of the reservation there to be used as a reservoir. are. And so this is a really, you know, a really sort of noteworthy example of how you can make

decisions that benefit one group of people, but the price of those decisions is paid by a different group of people in a different place. And that pattern really repeats itself over and over when you looked at sort of networked infrastructure. So it's like if you use electricity, where is the electricity being generated? Where is, you know, for the coal-fired plant, where is that coal coming from. If you look at, I mean, the simplest example is if you, you know, have a stove or a furnace or a car, that carbon dioxide goes in the air and affects people all over the world, whether or not they benefited from that energy usage. So this is sort of an intrinsic issue with infrastructure is that anything that benefits people by bringing resources to them can also, and

historically has been, used to extract resources from somewhere else or to displace the harms to somewhere else. And so having a really clear-eyed view of these infrastructural networks means seeing both sides of this and understanding that they're inextricably linked. All right. Let's go to the phones. Again, lots of callers. Isaac in

Missouri. Hi, Isaac. How do you do? Thank you for having me on. Love the show. Hey, I'm an geologist. I've worked in several different industries. Currently, I am mining critical element.

in southern Missouri, lead, zinc, copper, nickel, iron, cobalt. But previously, I worked on an expansion project of the Kentucky Lock. I served as basically the geologic and geotechnical project manager, and got to really learn about the TVA and the – Tennessee Valley. juggernaut. Yeah, and the juggernaut that it is of generation of energy, of controlling the geomorphology, generating power, but also, man, to see the coal bar just come through or to smell the wood pulp barges come through or the pig iron and to see, you know, the core of these dam. You've got to be a question here because I only have 10 minutes left. Oh, my bad.

I'm sorry. Yeah, can you just kind of comment a little bit on what the TVA is? And can you just kind of expand? Because I feel like it's a resource that is so impitual to our country. Okay. And no one knows about it. Okay. Right.

So, you know, it's funny that you should say, like, talk about the TVA in particular. But, of course, we actually hear about it all the time. We hear about it in the context of the Green New Deal because the TVA was part of the decision that was made between the two World Wars, that electricity was the thing that everybody in the United States needed to benefit from. And so there was this huge federal mandate to build out the TVA to build out the Bonneville

and the Western Dams and the rural electrification administration to build out the networks to bring grid electricity to everyone no matter where you lived. And part of the idea behind the Green New Deal is to update that, is to basically say, like, look, we made this incredible investment to build out these systems that everyone would benefit from, and it's time to do that again.

And you've seen the TVA, and you've seen the incredible investment and the incredible amount of work and labor that goes into it. And, you know, we can do this again, right? That we can make the decision that we are going to build systems that benefit everyone, again, just like we did during the New Deal, that resulted in the TVA. And how should we then make the... Let me just remind everybody

that this is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. How should these decisions be made? Well, you know, I really like the idea that politics is what you get when you have any group of people who are in a sustained relationship with each other. Right?

Something that they can't walk away from easily. And infrastructure is a really, you know, pure and obvious example of that, right? We're building these systems in our planet. None of us can leave the planet, And certainly, even where you live, the city you live in or the town that you live in. So figuring out how to make these decisions is, in fact, the work. You know, I said at the beginning of this segment that we have gone a really long way to figuring out the technological side of it.

But what we really are is figuring out the social side of it is how do we make the decisions, how do we move forward? But as I said, I think the thing that's really changed is that we can now see that there is a forward to move to that, you know, 20 years ago it would have been, well, we want to keep catastrophe from happening, right? We need to sacrifice and work and spend money so that we can limit the effects of climate change, right, to keep bad things from happening. And the thing I think that's really changed is that now we are looking at the possibility of we can rebuild a system that will not just, It will solve climate change almost as a side effect. Right. The real goal is to bring in these new technologies and to rebuild our infrastructure to be equitable, to be resilient, to be sustainable, to continue to work for the generations to come,

just like we benefit from the ones that were built for us. So do I hear you saying that instead of choosing one system to build first, we need to look at the whole picture. Yeah, and I think especially, sorry. No, I mean, people talk about, well, I want to build the grid. I want to build the highways. Or this bridge is we need to look at how it's going to affect climate change. So certainly one of the, let me try it again.

So certainly one of the things we really need to do is figure out where our energy comes from, right? Like the world runs on energy. We might, you know, we think about paying for things in dollars, but the actual currency of the material world is jewels, right? It's energy. So getting a handle on decarbonization means getting rid of fossil fuels and bringing in renewables. But once we do that, that really changes kind of everything. So one of the things that the TVA did is that access to inexpensive hydroelectricity meant that a world of industrial production suddenly became possible because suddenly things

that you couldn't do before, like make aluminum, because it just took too much energy, became really feasible. And so we can now imagine, well, if all of the... of the energy in the world is like hydroelectricity, that it's relatively inexpensive, it's renewably sourced, and we build it out in a way that's equitable, is it really opens up a new realm of possibilities in terms of industrial,

our industrial production, what do we build, how do we build it. And in particular, we can move away from the idea that we take things out of the ground, do something to them, and then dump them back into the ground, and instead really work on closing materials loops. So recycling, you know, any atoms that come out of the ground get reused into new atoms instead of being thrown out. This is all great stuff, Deb.

It's in your book, How Infrastructure Works Inside the Systems of Shape Our World. Dr. Deb Chachra, thank you for taking time to be with us today. Thank you so much for having me. And if our listeners want to read excerpts from the book, that can go to ScienceFriday.com slash infrastructure. And that's about all the time we have for today. A lot of people help make the show happen, including Lois partially Ariel Zich

Jordan Smudjick Diana Plasker and many more next time the science of crafting a perfect holiday meal I'm SciFRI producer Shoshana Bucksbaum see you tomorrow