He often brings out a sample shuttle tile as a prop when he talks about the importance of his field of heat transfer. He and other NASA consultants eventually suggested a better way to fire the ceramic tiles to improve their insulating properties and prevent the heat from penetrating to and melting the glue that holds them in place. With the 1970s also came an increased emphasis on insulation, what with the Arab oil embargo and the skyrocketing price of fuel, and Tien began to look at the effectiveness of new types of insulation and how well they prevented heat loss from buildings. He notes with pleasure that the Japanese firm Hitachi uses his basic formulas today in the design of magnetic levitation trains, which rely on low-temperature superconductors to generate immense magnetic fields. He also began working on the spread of fire in urban high rises.
Intense fire can ignite distant objects merely from radiated heat.
While colleagues at Berkeley, including Brady Williamson and Pat Pagni, looked at other aspects of spreading fires, Tien concentrated on the effects of radiant heat. His expertise also came into play in the design of emergency core cooling systems for nuclear reactors. Because of this experience he was called to consult on the Three Mile Island reactor melt-down in 1982, and again when the Ukrainian reactor melted at Chernobyl in 1986. In both cases officials wanted to know what happened, and whether the core could have melted through the containment vessel and into the ground, a situation known as the China syndrome. Until 1990 Tien remained a consultant with the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission.