Transcript
Host: Alex Conacher
Guest: Leslie Gartner and narada Golden
---------------------------
Alex
Just to come this far has required three interviews and a full background check
Host 2
The car makes another turn on the desert road.
Alex
You open your rucksack and check your passes and documents are all there for the fifth time.
Host 2
The car has been driving over an hour since leaving the main highway, and as it crests a hill, another light source beside your headlamps illuminates the landscape
SOUND – CAR BRAKES GENTLY, SOUND OF GRAVEL AS IT STOPS
SOUND – A MAN ASKS A QUESTION INDISTINCTLY, ANOTHER ANSWERS
Alex
As your driver pulls up to the perimeter fence, you both present papers to security and are waved through to the main entrance
Host 2
Heading through on your own, you pass another security check and, once the guard receives confirmation that everything is safe inside, you get to enter the building
SOUND – PAUSE THEN BEGIN REALLY EERY MUSIC
Alex (loud whisper until end of intro)
Once inside you have to take off all of your clothes, deposit them in a container, and put on scrubs.
Host 2 (loud whisper until end of intro)
After this you are allowed to the next stage where you test and put on an air suit. Two layers of globes follow…
Alex
Then boots… then a respirator system that links to an air supply from the building itself
Host 2
And again, you are allowed to proceed... Every 10 metres you have to detach your breathing tube and reattach it to the next section’s air supply.
Alex
If everything goes according to plan, none of this equipment will be needed.
Host 2 (whispering ends)
But if something goes wrong, it may save your life… you are not in a safe place
Alex (whispering ends)
You have just arrived in a Biosafety Level 4 Containment Lab.
SOUND – A SLIDING DOOR SHUTTING FOLLOWED BY A SINGLE, DEEP DRUM STRIKE
1. HELLO AND WELCOME
OPENING MUSIC
Alex and Host 2
Hello and welcome to Engineering Matters, I’m Alex Conacher and I’m Host 2. For this episode we have partnered with WSP to talk about high containment labs
Host 2
These are isolated, secure locations that contain some of the deadliest materials on the planet. They are the frontline in our efforts to understand and prevent outbreaks of deadly disease
Alex
They are also extraordinarily intricate, complicated and expensive structures, that often require a large amount of energy, water and chemicals to function.
Host 2
Compromising such a facility’s operations in any way is simply not an option.
Alex
So, when it comes to, say… a target for Net Zero by 2050, designing a lab with that end in mind is very different to an office block.
Host 2
To do so requires not just an understanding of engineering, but an understanding of the science and the scientists themselves….
Alex
It requires an intelligent approach to an unknown future… building in flexibility to take advantage of new technological wins, and mitigate technological disappointments…
Host 2
But most of all it requires a common-sense approach to where we currently are, and what we can do
Alex
But we are getting ahead of ourselves. Unlike our avatar in the opening of this episode, most of us have not actually been inside a lab. There are a range of types and classifications… there are some design commonalities they share… and some they don’t.
2. BACKGROUND
MUSIC
Leslie
The big changes are really just in terms of how scientists are looking at bigger and bigger problems, if you will, or bigger challenges…
Leslie
they want all the toys in all the rooms…
Leslie
…so it's much more advanced, if you will, than sort of the mad scientist in the old days, in his dark little room trying to try to develop things.
Alex
This is Les Gartner, Senior Vice President for Science and Technology Design at WSP USA
Host 2
After training as an architect, he has been working to design laboratories, liaising with scientists for 20 years
Leslie
Yeah, so my, my career a lot of expertise has been developed in BSL three and BSL four labs, or in other parts of the world. P3, P4, or CL3, CL4… they all have the same number three or four…
Alex
But the letter before it refers to either Biosafety Level, or Pathogen Level, or Containment Level. It all means basically the same thing. There is a 1-4 categorisation of lab security levels.
Leslie
A Level 1 lab, a BSL 1 lab is like someone's kitchen counter. It can have some contaminants or bacteria on it, so you’ve got to keep it clean. A Level 2 lab is like a university type of lab where you could be exposed to a variety of things. But generally, they're not… they may be contagious, which they are, but they're not going to have a mortality to them…
Host 2
Or we have a way to prevent people from getting sick from the pathogen
Leslie
And then a level three lab is where it starts getting trickier.
Alex
(And where Les’s team generally works)
Leslie
These are from a human perspective, they could be very catastrophic, like AIDS, for example. But they are not transmitted through the air, they are transmitted through contact or things like that. So we know how to prevent it. Or if it is transmitted through the air, we have a vaccine, or some therapeutic to prevent people from getting it.
Host 2
And the pathogens studied in a BSL 4 lab are far more dangerous.
Leslie
…they have a high mortality rate, there is no treatment or vaccine at the time to prevent it. Think of like Ebola, which has a very catastrophic… you know, basically you get it, you have a high percentage chance that you could die from it. And so those are the viruses, the nasty viruses that that that a lot of the labs I work on
Leslie
diagnose those, those viruses, you know, things come in, and they got to determine what they are, or they research, how to prevent that.
Alex
These are the most secure biohazard facilities built by human hands. They take the deadliest organisms so that they can understand them to develop a vaccine or therapeutic treatment for them.
Host 2
Most countries aspire to have at least one level four lab, but there are only a few dozen operating worldwide
Leslie
They're very expensive to operate, very expensive to build. And it takes a specialised knowledgeable person to operate it. So you see, certainly, a higher percentage and high degree number of level three labs.
Alex
The expense is at least a factor of 10 greater than the most expensive office space in the most exclusive locations
Leslie
It does depend on how big they are, of course, and where they're built, and all the specifics, but generally, they're around $1,800 to $2,000, a square foot, which is like $20,000 a square metre.
Leslie
We're doing one right now just put it in perspective for you. There's one lab floor, which is a three metre floor space. Above it, there's a HEPA filter floor…
Host 2
A HEPA filter is a high-efficiency particulate absorbing filter
Leslie
…and then a floor and a half of mechanical above it. So there are there's another four metres, another four metres, so there's eight metres of…
Leslie
…mechanical space above it.
Alex
Just this one lab floor space
Leslie
And then below it, we have a floor where all the piping drainage is. And then below that, we have all those support services, like incinerator, generators, things like that. And then we also have
Leslie
a utility floor so we basically have two and a half floors below two and a half floors above to service one lab floor. So there's a there's a lot of engineering in there.
Host 2
And engineering takes power and energy.
Alex
But so do the containment aspects of the lab. Level 3 labs have to process and dispose of all waste, while Level 4 labs have to incinerate everything. Incineration has a huge environmental impact and can’t be avoided.
Host 2
Then there is the air itself…
Leslie
So all of the air that comes out of I'll say the top high containment lab, a level four lab is double HEPA filtered.
Leslie
And it will filter 99.97% of our all particles. And so it goes through two of those. So each one of those, then filters the air, and then that air is dispersed out.
Alex
After the lab processes verify the air has been cleaned.
Leslie
So it gets dispersed out at high speeds out into the environment after it goes through this double HEPA filtration system. The inflow air is actually single HEPA filtered, so that if there's any kind of situation, any backflow will not go back up through that one. So the whole lab is protected by filtration systems of air
Host 2
Meanwhile the plumbing system cooks all water to about 150 degrees Celsius to kill anything that’s in there, the water then needs to be cooled down and discharged into a dedicated sewer system for testing, then allowed back into the environment
Leslie
we use mixing tanks from the other liquid waste in the in the facility to cool it down. So we're not adding more water. And then on top of that we have looked at you know, harvesting rainwater or, or other things to provide a reservoir of water that they will always have, in case there's any issues with utilities or anything like that. So resiliency comes into safety, you know, this building has to be able to operate during crisis, whether it be a tornado or, or an earthquake or a hurricane or whatever, or, or just power outages or something. Somebody's doing something intentional. So they have a lot of safety requirements to them. And so if we can provide a backup water source that takes builds in greater resiliency, and then use that to cool down water. It's a win-win situation for the facility and makes it a safe operation, if you will.
Alex
There are also energy resiliency requirements, two power lines going in, emergency generators, batteries, uninterruptable power systems
MUSIC
Host 2
Modern labs are becoming very equipment-intensive and are demanding flexibility.
Leslie
I think what we're seeing more and more trends is, is adding new equipment into the containment labs. So if you think like you're going to a to a to a hospital, and they don't know what you have. So they might give you an MRI or something like this. Well, the same is happening inside the containment labs. They want to say well, you know if I could do that and study a high containment virus, with machines like that, how, how would I do that. And so the challenge is to put an MRI or something like that into a containment lab. And so now you've got different shielding around the room. You can't use metal containment, rebar, things like so you are creating a special little room inside. And then you're also sealing it up, making it sealed.
Alex
And a lot of this equipment needs regular maintenance. And so you have got other people that need to get to that equipment to maintain it.
Leslie
A lot of the equipment has relief vents. You can't just relief from the inside of containment out to the outside world without having some filters and restrictions on that. So there's a lot of technical challenges, but I'd say the planning parts of it are equally challenging. Because you want to use standard equipment and yet it's not really set up for decontamination. A lot of that equipment could get destroyed with repeat decontamination and it's expensive. So dealing with how to add in some of those pieces of equipment that they might see in a regular lab into containment has been sort of the ongoing challenge that we've seen over time.
Host 2
Another challenge is communications
Leslie
…just the amount of communications How do you How much can you really put in there, like every piece of equipment, now has a little data port to get information off of… everything is information. And a lot of these are really secure facilities. So you cannot use wireless. So it's a totally, you know, air gapped building. So everything has to be kept internalised. And so the building is wired, as much as possible for today, and for the future. So what does the future hold? In terms of this, all we know is more and more equipment, more and more information, more and more data. And that every piece of all of those require energy and electricity. And so we end up putting a lot of extra redundant stuff in because it's very difficult to put that in afterwards. So it's, it's designing it for this future.
Alex
You can look at the demands and changes of the past…
Leslie
But if you're building something for, you know, 25, 30, 40 years, you're gonna have to take some predictive approaches on how they might be able to add in new technologies to the spaces and so, you know, the equipment drives so much of these spaces, data, electrical, heat build-up, all those sorts of things.
Host 2
Increasing energy requirements for more complex facilities. Anathema to reducing the laboratory footprint
Alex
Time to call in a sustainability expert
3. BODY
MUSIC
Narada
One of the challenges with labs is that they are quite complicated, which I know that Les talked about some and there is a lot going on within a lab, and each lab is quite different. And so often, adding a sustainability lens to lab projects that are already very complicated, can make them even more challenging.
Alex
This is Narada Golden, he is the National Director for Built Ecology at WSP USA.
Narada
And so often, adding a sustainability lens to lab projects that are already very complicated, can make them even more challenging. And so one of the things we try to do is simplify the question and focus on the areas that are most important.
Host 2
This can be distilled down to a key question: “where is the carbon?”
Narada
And our industry is learning a lot about this. And for a long time, we've known that energy, electricity, natural gas, other fossil fuels are associated with carbon emissions. And so people have focused quite heavily on energy use and reducing energy use. We're seeing a larger focus on what's called embodied carbon. And that's an understanding that there are also carbon emissions associated with the concrete we use, the steel we use, all the equipment that goes into labs and all of the operations that happens through the research.
Alex
And so engineers are faced with a balancing act between emissions associated with embodied carbon, versus emissions associated with operational carbon… because the alternative is, well, no lab. And diseases running rampant.
Narada
But there are a couple of important dynamics to understand. One, you hear a lot of discussion about electrification, as a strategy for sustainability.
Host 2
(Many grids are getting cleaner as they invest in renewable energy)
Narada
electricity is going to be cleaner 10 years from now than it is today. So every building that is using electricity will ultimately be cleaner 10 years now than it is today. Because of that there has been a focus on using more electricity in buildings and using fewer fossil fuels, natural gas and other types of fossil fuels. So electrification is one strategy for implementing sustainability outcomes.
Alex
But this can become complicated for a lab, where there are specific uses for which natural gas is far more efficient than electricity
Narada
So I know I've worked with Les on projects where we are looking at things like incineration, and even the operation of different labs and the fuels that they're using to do their research. And that makes it a little bit more challenging to electrify labs specifically, they also many of them need steam for various uses. And it's very hard to produce steam without some sort of natural gas.
Host 2
In these cases, hydrogen can provide an answer… but hydrogen needs its own infrastructure which at present is not there
Alex
Another challenge is around disposal of water and lab chemicals, and there have been scientific advances in these areas (because, understandably, scientists are interested in sustainability). Getting these options into the building requires engineers and scientists to talk to one another.
Narada
We have worked with researchers that have wanted to make their research, their chemistry, the work, they're doing cleaner and greener, but haven't had the facilities to do that. So we can't design a lab for a green research practice unless that researcher wants to implement it. So we really start by talking to them talking about their goals for making that research better, more effective, and hopefully more sustainable.
Host 2
Labs often require a large amount of ventilation compared to other buildings
Narada
…moving fresh air into that lab to pull all of the chemicals that may be in the air out of the lab, and make sure that they are safe for people. And so a big percentage of the energy used in labs is associated with ventilation. And one of the strategies for dealing with that is trying to group the things, the activities that require a lot of ventilation together, so that you're not necessarily bringing fresh amounts of air throughout the entire lab facility, but maybe just small areas within the larger lab. And that has an energy use because we're you know, a cold day we're heating up that air, we're conditioning it and that all takes energy.
Alex
The more air brought into a building, the more energy you're using to heat it up or cool it down and condition it.
Narada
And so minimising ventilation, doing research where you need that high amount of ventilation in kind of limited areas, smaller volumes so that you need a less fresh air and having ventilation that is variable depending on the air quality and what's happening in that space so that you're not bringing in more outside air then you need.
MUSIC
Host 2
There is a lot of searching for co-benefits, but equally a lot of the thinking revolves around “why do we need X” and working from there. Take incineration.
Narada
Why do we need incineration? And are there ways to reduce that need for incineration bays based on the research that we're doing and potential changes in that research. So if we can reduce the need, that is often the easiest way to reduce the associated environmental impacts. And again, that is focused on how the research done is done and the operations associated with it.
Alex
Narada says that on his projects, aside from “where is the carbon”, he also asks…
Narada
“Where is the energy?” And for every project, we often complete an energy model. And that energy model will tell you 50% of the energy uses associated with ventilation possible, possibly 15% is associated with lighting, another 25 is associated with equipment. And you start to get a picture of the things that are using the most energy in that project. And that helps you prioritise where to focus.
Host 2
Which helps prioritise where to focus.
Narada
So when we develop an energy model for lab, it looks very different than an energy model for an office building or a residential facility. When you look at an office building compared to a residential building, you'll see a lot more energy associated with heating water, because you have people running dishwashers or taking showers. And in an office, you just don't have that. So that becomes a bigger priority in a residential building than it does an office… within labs, as I said before, ventilation is a big focus. And so really reducing the need for ventilation is pretty important. And then focusing on those systems that require natural gas, and trying to move those labs away from fossil fuels. And so we're going to see technologies in the next 10 years that do a better job of producing steam with electricity, you can get them now, they tend to be small and localised. So you can actually have something at your, your lab desk or station that produces steam with electricity. It is a little bit more expensive to operate because it uses a lot of electricity. But we're going to see changes in that over the next 10 years for sure.
Alex
But common strategies that are true in office and relevant buildings that are also relevant in labs are energy efficient lighting… control systems that turn off lights or reduce when people are not around. Lowered ventilation in rooms without people… these are pretty much universal.
Narada
And you always want to have a good picture of, of real time energy use within a lab facility and be able to manage that.
Narada
And I think we try to simplify those solutions, in part because if we present 1015 20 different options to our clients, who are already dealing with very complex lab designs, it becomes overwhelming.
MUSIC
Host 2
This is an interesting point, because the future is inherently complicated when new technologies are concerned. As a lab owner looks further ahead, the what-ifs multiply. To tackle this, Les and Narada use an approach called ‘back-casting’
Narada
An example of the approach we take with our clients, and this large lab campus in the UK, asked us to develop a pathway to a net zero future, and net zero carbon future. And the approach that we take
Narada
is really to help understand what that future looks like really articulating what a lab in a Net Zero future in 2050 may look like. And use a process called back casting, which is kind of working backwards from that Future Lab to understand how we can get there.
Alex
We know, for example that a lab wants to get into a position to benefit from green electricity in the future
Narada
So we do prioritise energy efficiency for those systems that use electricity. But for lab specifically, the thing that we tend to focus on is the systems that use natural gas, for heating for hot water for steam. And we presented four different scenarios for getting to a net zero lab in 2015. The first one is really extreme efficiency. And this is, as we present this, we know that new systems will be installed between now and 2050. The average life of these systems may be 10 or 15 years so that future technology will be more efficient. And if you absolutely need to use fossil fuels, you want to make sure that you are looking at five to 10 times an improvement in efficiency.
Alex
Another scenario is a plan to shift to using electricity in the future
Narada
As I said before, there may not be a lot of available technology today to produce steam using electricity at a large scale. But manufacturers are working to develop those technologies to make that possible in 10 to 15 years. So we can design the building today to plan for a future technology that allows you to produce steam with electricity in the future. Some, some developers and clients then say, well, why wouldn't we do that today? What's the benefit of waiting 10 to 15 years?
Host 2
And that really does depend on the technology itself.
Narada
But for this large lab campus, we looked very closely at what it would take to design for electrification of heating and hot water today. And they are planning very likely on doing that throughout most of the facility. And that's because there have been a lot of advances in efficiency of electric system for heating and hot water over the last 10 years. There are a certain uses like steam, as I said before that are a little bit challenging to produce with electricity. And so the other scenario we looked at was designing the building to anticipate and plan for the use of hydrogen to produce steam in maybe around 2035, at the end of the life of this existing system. So this is another way of thinking about flexibility, and designing for future cleaner fuels. And something that we did for this lab campus when we knew that there was not available technology today to be able to install in the project.
Alex
The idea is to always be in a position where there are multiple options available, no matter the course of history and technology
Narada
We are not in the business of predicting the future. But we this is one of the reasons we designed for flexibility
Host 2
If asked whether one should design for a future based around electricity or hydrogen, the answer is to design for both
4. WRAP-UP
MUSIC
Narada
There are a lot of misconceptions about what sustainability is. And a lot of times, early on in design meetings, we are working with clients to understand and address some of those misconceptions. So people often think that sustainability is putting a solar panel, or maybe some plants on top of your building, or investing in some sort of silver bullet technology that may make everything better,
Alex
Or potentially not investing in any technology today, because there's going to be something that we don't know about that will come in 10 years, that's going to reduce the impact of your project.
Narada
And oftentimes, these ideas can be helpful, but they may distract from some very common-sense solutions that are sitting right in front of us…
Narada
…that looks different in a lab compared to an office building or a residential building. And not focus on silver bullet solutions, but integrated solutions that really capitalise on co-benefits or realise co-benefits. And so I think that shift from, you know, what's the super innovative technology that I can install to make this sustainable project to the work of coordinating across many disciplines to come up withmore energy efficient, more resilient, healthier design, that is going to work and isn't going to be too complicated, is really what we tend to focus on.
Host 2
And that requires a lot more communication, an interdisciplinary approach.
Narada
Sometimes it is less sexy or interesting than that latest technology that you might want to put on top of the building. But we found that that kind of integrated thinking and interdisciplinary thinking results in better projects that are going to be better for people and better for the environment.
Alex
And it is fundamentally good work to do. Here’s Les again.
Leslie
I've been doing it for quite a while. But you know, it's a very, very rewarding to do projects like this that have sort of important aspects for helping our nation's health. You know, like, it helps us to understand the risks of these viruses and help people manage through that, develop vaccines, therapeutics… so we can live good, strong lives.
ENDING MUSIC
Engineering Matters is a production of Reby Media
This episode was written and hosted by me, Alex Conacher
Sound Engineering by Ross MacPherson
Series supervision by Jon Young
And our own high containment pathogen is Rory Harris
Special thanks to our episode partner WSP
