...auto executives could now see a point on the horizon when China might actually overtake the United States as the world’s largest automobile market. It was inevitable, they said. It was just a matter of time. In 2004 General Motors predicted that it could happen as early as 2025. Some went further and said it could happen as early as 2020. Maybe even 2018. But, they would add, that would be a real stretch.
As things turned out, it happened much sooner — in 2009, amid the Great Recession. That year China, accelerating in the fast lane, not only overtook the United States but pulled into a clear lead.
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During World War II, in order to meet the energy needs of factories working two or three shifts a day to supply the war effort, the East Ohio Gas Company built an LNG storage facility in Cleveland. In October 1944 one of the tanks failed. Stored [liquefied natural gas] seeped into the sewer system and ignited, killing 129 people and creating a mile-long fireball. Subsequently, the causes of the accident were identified: poor ventilation, insufficient containment measures, and the improper use of a particular steel alloy that turned brittle at very low temperatures. The design and safety lessons would be seared into the minds of future developers.
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It was one thing to build an atomic bomb. It was quite another to harness a controlled chain reaction of fission to generate power. So much had to be invented and developed from scratch—the technology, the engineering, the know-how. It was Rickover who chose the pressurized light-water reactor as the propulsion system. He also imposed “an engineering and technical discipline unknown to industry or, except for his own organization, to government.”
To accomplish his goals, Rickover built a cadre of highly skilled and highly trained officers for the nuclear navy, who were constantly pushed to operate at peak standards of performance...
In Rickover’s tireless campaign to build a nuclear submarine and bulldoze through bureaucracy, he so alienated his superiors that he was twice passed over for promotion to admiral. It took congressional intervention to finally secure him the title.
Rickover’s methods worked. The development of the technology, the engineering , and construction for a nuclear submarine—all these were achieved in record time. The first nuclear submarine, the USS Nautilus, was commissioned in 1954. The whole enterprise had been achieved in seven years—compared with the quarter century that others had predicted. In 1958, to great acclaim, the Nautilus accomplished a formidable, indeed unthinkable, feat—it sailed 1,400 miles under the North Pole and the polar ice cap. The journey was nonstop except for those times when the ship got temporarily stuck between the massive ice cap and the shallow sea bottom. When, on the ship’s return, the Nautilus’s captain was received at the White House, the abrasive Rickover, who was ultimately responsible for the very existence of the Nautilus, was pointedly excluded from the ceremony.
...By the time Rickover finally retired in 1986, 40 percent of the navy’s major combatant ships would be nuclear propelled.
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