PRESTRESSED BY NADER

Prestressed concrete has been found very economical in the building trade. In designing a structural member, all concrete below the neutral layer (the concrete stressed in tension) is considered cracked and ineffective, that is, wasted. As we hope to have explained above, a prestressed concrete structural member contains no neutral layer, since it has been displaced beyond its cross-section. In buildings, the economy of using prestressed concrete is thus due to using less concrete for the same strength.

Nevertheless, the Federal Highway Administration considers this type of pavement promising; it has sponsored research resulting in the publication of nine reports since 1971, all of them favorable to the idea. Most of these reports are actually construction guidelines, the last one published in 1981.

But prestressed concrete has another friend and promoter beside the FHWA and the cement industry: Ralph Nader.

As his star has faded, the great apostle of victimizing consumers by government coercion has all but disappeared from this newsletter. What makes him newsworthy again now is that the erstwhile champion of sleuthing, snatching, smearing and suing has lost his touch as a sleuthing snitcher, though perhaps not for smearing and suing.

Last August, some two years after the ninth favorable FHWA report, Ralph Biomouth penned a letter to Transportation Secretary Dole, accusing the FHWA of suppressing research and promotion of prestressed concrete, and demanding "an investigation by your office of the unconscionable mishandling of a proven, superior method of building highways and bridges. This mishandling has involved appalling delays, a coziness with the Portland Cement Association bordering on collusion, and mistreatment of both FHWA employees and citizens who have been reprimanded and excluded from access to information."

He released this testimonial to his intellect to the press before he sent it to the recipient; and when it arrived, an official found it so incredibly silly that he phoned Naders office to check whether it was not a fraud. It wasn't: Naders incompetence was genuine, unfeigned, and all his very own.

The coziness bordering on collusion must have amused the Portland Cement Association no end. "We welcome Nader's endorsement of prestressed concrete," said its Vice President M.L. Burgener. "If the pavement could be made economical, it would expand the use of portland cement."

Nader, in short, is not what he used to be. As the American Spectator wrote about him not long ago, time wounds all heels...