Information Processing

 The EV tipping point has arrived in China. Even most techology experts do not appreciate the coming huge impacts on global economics, manufacturing, energy transition, etc.

Corey and Steve interview Leif Wenar, Professor of Philosophy at Stanford University and author of Blood Oil. They begin with memories of Leif and Corey’s mutual friend David Foster Wallace and end with a discussion of John Rawls and Robert Nozick (Wenar's thesis advisor at Harvard, and a friend of Steve's). Corey asks whether Leif shares his view that analytic philosophy had become too divorced from wider intellectual life. Leif explains his effort to re-engage philosophy in the big issues of our day as Hobbes, Rousseau, Locke, Mill and Marx were in theirs. He details how a trip to Nigeria gave him insight into the real problems facing real people in oil-rich countries. Leif explains how the legal concept of “efficiency” led to the resource curse and argues that we should refuse to buy oil from countries that are not minimally accountable to their people. Steve notes that some may find this approach too idealistic and not in the US interest. Leif suggests that what philosophers can contribute is the ability to see the big synthetic picture in a complex world.

Transcript

Leif Wenar (Bio)

Blood Oil: Tyrants, Violence, and the Rules That Run the World

John Rawls - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Robert Nozick - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy


man·i·fold /ˈmanəˌfōld/ many and various.

In mathematics, a manifold is a topological space that locally resembles Euclidean space near each point.

Steve Hsu and Corey Washington have been friends for almost 30 years, and between them hold PhDs in Neuroscience, Philosophy, and Theoretical Physics. Join them for wide ranging and unfiltered conversations with leading writers, scientists, technologists, academics, entrepreneurs, investors, and more.

Steve Hsu is VP for Research and Professor of Theoretical Physics at Michigan State University. He is also a researcher in computational genomics and founder of several Silicon Valley startups, ranging from information security to biotech. Educated at Caltech and Berkeley, he was a Harvard Junior Fellow and held faculty positions at Yale and the University of Oregon before joining MSU.

Corey Washington is Director of Analytics in the Office of Research and Innovation at Michigan State University. He was educated at Amherst College and MIT before receiving a PhD in Philosophy from Stanford and a PhD in a Neuroscience from Columbia. He held faculty positions at the University Washington and the University of Maryland. Prior to MSU, Corey worked as a biotech consultant and is founder of a medical diagnostics startup.

Steve and Corey talk to Tim Searchinger about the unintended consequences of biofuels policies. Searchinger argues that these policies do not consider the opportunity costs of using plants for fuel rather than food. Combined with crazy carbon accounting principles, existing rules make cutting down trees in the US, shipping them to Europe and burning them in power plants count as carbon neutral under the Kyoto protocol. The three also discuss how eating less beef in the developed world along with educating women, family planning, and reducing child mortality in the developing world can decrease stress on land use and emissions.

Transcript

Creating a Sustainable Food Future: A Menu of Solutions to Feed Nearly 10 Billion People by 2050

Timothy Searchinger is a Research Scholar in the Center for Policy Research on Energy and the Environment at the Woodrow Wilson School, Princeton University.


man·i·fold /ˈmanəˌfōld/ many and various.

In mathematics, a manifold is a topological space that locally resembles Euclidean space near each point.

Steve Hsu and Corey Washington have been friends for almost 30 years, and between them hold PhDs in Neuroscience, Philosophy, and Theoretical Physics. Join them for wide ranging and unfiltered conversations with leading writers, scientists, technologists, academics, entrepreneurs, investors, and more.

Steve Hsu is VP for Research and Professor of Theoretical Physics at Michigan State University. He is also a researcher in computational genomics and founder of several Silicon Valley startups, ranging from information security to biotech. Educated at Caltech and Berkeley, he was a Harvard Junior Fellow and held faculty positions at Yale and the University of Oregon before joining MSU.

Corey Washington is Director of Analytics in the Office of Research and Innovation at Michigan State University. He was educated at Amherst College and MIT before receiving a PhD in Philosophy from Stanford and a PhD in a Neuroscience from Columbia. He held faculty positions at the University Washington and the University of Maryland. Prior to MSU, Corey worked as a biotech consultant and is founder of a medical diagnostics startup.

Have we reached the tipping point (i.e., ~$.05 per kilowatt hour) with renewables? The documentary claims that large investments by China and Germany have brought this to fruition, with a million people now employed in the Chinese solar industry. (Elon not so crazy after all? :-)

See also The one sided clash of civilizations.

Telegraph: ...If the aim was to choke the US shale industry, the Saudis have misjudged badly, just as they misjudged the growing shale threat at every stage for eight years.

... The problem for the Saudis is that US shale frackers are not high-cost. They are mostly mid-cost, and as I reported from the CERAWeek energy forum in Houston, experts at IHS think shale companies may be able to shave those costs by 45pc this year - and not only by switching tactically to high-yielding wells.

Advanced pad drilling techniques allow frackers to launch five or ten wells in different directions from the same site. Smart drill-bits with computer chips can seek out cracks in the rock. New dissolvable plugs promise to save $300,000 a well. "We've driven down drilling costs by 50pc, and we can see another 30pc ahead," said John Hess, head of the Hess Corporation.

It was the same story from Scott Sheffield, head of Pioneer Natural Resources. "We have just drilled an 18,000 ft well in 16 days in the Permian Basin. Last year it took 30 days," he said.

The North American rig-count has dropped to 664 from 1,608 in October but output still rose to a 43-year high of 9.6m b/d June. It has only just begun to roll over. "The freight train of North American tight oil has kept on coming," said Rex Tillerson, head of Exxon Mobil.

... The wells will still be there. The technology and infrastructure will still be there. Stronger companies will mop up on the cheap, taking over the operations. Once oil climbs back to $60 or even $55 - since the threshold keeps falling - they will crank up production almost instantly.

OPEC now faces a permanent headwind. Each rise in price will be capped by a surge in US output. The only constraint is the scale of US reserves that can be extracted at mid-cost, and these may be bigger than originally supposed, not to mention the parallel possibilities in Argentina and Australia, or the possibility for "clean fracking" in China as plasma pulse technology cuts water needs.

... Saudi Arabia is effectively beached. It relies on oil for 90pc of its budget revenues. There is no other industry to speak of, a full fifty years after the oil bonanza began.

... In hindsight, it was a strategic error to hold prices so high, for so long, allowing shale frackers - and the solar industry - to come of age. The genie cannot be put back in the bottle.

Unfortunately, the build cost is estimated at $600-800k. I'm more interested in the (presumably cheaper) insulation technologies than in the solar panels. See here for energy usage by housing type; a significant chunk of total US energy consumption goes to heating and cooling buildings.

Atlantic Monthly: ... NIST believes that this home – with 10 kilowatts of photovoltaic panels on the roof, and another four solar thermal panels over the front porch – will generate as much energy as a four-person family can consume in a year. This is, in other words, a “net-zero” house.

The problems at Fukushima got me thinking about pebble bed reactors, described in the WIRED magazine article below. It would be very sweet to have a reactor that self-regulates its temperature in event of catastrophe. Here is a recent NYTimes article.

WIRED: ... Beneath its cavernous main room are the 100 tons of steel, graphite, and hydraulic gear known as HTR-10 (i.e., high-temperature reactor, 10 megawatt). The plant's output is underwhelming; at full power - first achieved in January - it would barely fulfill the needs of a town of 4,000 people. But what's inside HTR-10, which until now has never been visited by a Western journalist, makes it the most interesting reactor in the world.

In the air-conditioned chill of the visitors' area, a grad student runs through the basics. Instead of the white-hot fuel rods that fire the heart of a conventional reactor, HTR-10 is powered by 27,000 billiards-sized graphite balls packed with tiny flecks of uranium. Instead of superhot water - intensely corrosive and highly radioactive - the core is bathed in inert helium. The gas can reach much higher temperatures without bursting pipes, which means a third more energy pushing the turbine. No water means no nasty steam, and no billion-dollar pressure dome to contain it in the event of a leak. And with the fuel sealed inside layers of graphite and impermeable silicon carbide - designed to last 1 million years - there's no steaming pool for spent fuel rods. Depleted balls can go straight into lead-lined steel bins in the basement.

... The key trick is a phenomenon known as Doppler broadening - the hotter atoms get, the more they spread apart, making it harder for an incoming neutron to strike a nucleus. In the dense core of a conventional reactor, the effect is marginal. But HTR-10's carefully designed geometry, low fuel density, and small size make for a very different story. In the event of a catastrophic cooling-system failure, instead of skyrocketing into a bad movie plot, the core temperature climbs to only about 1,600 degrees Celsius - comfortably below the balls' 2,000-plus-degree melting point - and then falls. This temperature ceiling makes HTR-10 what engineers privately call walk-away safe. As in, you can walk away from any situation and go have a pizza.

... If Wu's pebble-bed "thing" is, well, hot, it's because Chinergy's product is tailor-made for the world's fastest-growing energy market: a modular design that snaps together like Legos. Despite some attempts at standardization, the latest generation of big nukes are still custom-built onsite. By contrast, production versions of INET's reactor will be barely a fifth their size and power, and built from standardized components that can be mass-produced, shipped by road or rail, and assembled quickly. Moreover, multiple reactors can be daisy-chained around one or more turbines, all monitored from a single control room. In other words, Tsinghua's power plants can do the two things that matter most amid China's explosive growth: get where they're needed and get big, fast.

See also here. Unfortunately I believe the S. African project has run out of money.

... In the event of a complete shutdown of helium flow in the pebble bed, the temperature would rise at most to 2,900°F, a level well below the thermal limit of the graphite pebbles. At the higher temperature, the more plentiful uranium-238 nuclei absorb more neutrons (due to an effect called Doppler broadening) and the reactor output decreases, lowering the reactor temperature until an equilibrium is reached. The reactor heat is transferred passively by radiation, conduction, and natural convection to the steel reactor vessel, which is designed to reject the heat without human intervention.

UK government Chief Scientific Officer Professor John Beddington comments on the developments at Fukushima nuclear plant. I hope he is correct.

If the Japanese fail to keep the reactors cool and fail to keep the pressure in the containment vessels at an appropriate level, you can get this, you know, the dramatic word "meltdown." But what does that actually mean? What a meltdown involves is the basic reactor core melts, and as it melts, nuclear material will fall through to the floor of the container. There it will react with concrete and other materials that is likely.

Remember this is the reasonable worst case, we don't think anything worse is going to happen. In this reasonable worst case you get an explosion. You get some radioactive material going up to about 500 meters up into the air. Now, that's really serious, but it's serious again for the local area. It's not serious for elsewhere, even if you get a combination of that explosion it would only have nuclear material going in to the air up to about 500 meters.

If you then couple that with the worst possible weather situation, i.e. prevailing weather taking radioactive material in the direction of Greater Tokyo and you had maybe rainfall which would bring the radioactive material down, do we have a problem? The answer is unequivocally no. Absolutely no issue.

The problems are within 30 km of the reactor. And to give you a flavor for that, when Chernobyl had a massive fire at the graphite core, material was going up not just 500 meters but to 30,000 feet; it was lasting not for the odd hour or so but lasted months, and that was putting nuclear radioactive material up into the upper atmosphere for a very long period of time. But even in the case of Chernobyl, the exclusion zone that they had was about 30 kilometers. And in that exclusion zone, outside that, there is no evidence whatsoever to indicate people had problems from the radiation.

The problems with Chernobyl were people were continuing to drink the water, continuing to eat vegetables and so on and that was where the problems came from. That's not going to be the case here. So what I would really reemphasize is that this is very problematic for the area and the immediate vicinity and one has to have concerns for the people working there. Beyond that 20 or 30 kilometers, it's really not an issue for health.

I highly recommend this interview with Bob Laughlin (1998 Nobel for fractional quantum hall effect). Laughlin discusses topics ranging from energy and carbon emissions (topic of his new book) to globalization and innovation (he was President of KAIST for 2 years) to philosophy of science (emergent phenomena, Confucianism, Monism!). He even notes that elite higher education is a signaling racket :-)

[About 1 hour into the podcast. Discusses flash memory, blue diodes, flat screen displays.]

... All I can tell you is that this is playing out now and we'll see. ... Maybe it's true you can do without all that manufacturing capability. However, this is not what we are talking about. What we are talking about is innovation and American innovation. I think American innovation is not nearly as great as the proponents say it is. Because they are not telling the truth.

Shout out to Tiko:

Laughlin Nobel biography: ... A few days after the Nobel Prize announcement I got the following wonderful e-mail from Andrew Tikofsky, one of my best graduate students, who is now on Wall Street:

Hi Bob, Ian McDonald, Steve Strong, and I are getting together for a beer near Grand Central Station this coming Tuesday in honor of your prize. You are cordially invited to attend.

Yesterday I heard a great interview (Bloomberg podcast -- unfortunately no longer available online; but see here) with venture capitalist Vinod Khosla (formerly of Kleiner-Perkins, co-founder of Sun), who has been investing in energy technologies of late. One interesting comment he made was that no technology or environmental solution will scale (certainly not enough to affect global warming) unless there is a profit to be made along the way.

Some numbers from this DOE report.

Sources of Electricity

• Currently - around 13 TW of Annualized Average Power Consumption on the Earth.

• Fossil Fuel → Annual Production of 25 billion Metric tons of CO2 ⇒ Requires Massive & Efficient Underground Storage.

• 10 TW ≡ 10^4 One GW Nuclear Power Plants – Will exhaust Terrestrial Uranium Resources in 10 years if constructed.

• Maximum Practical Hydroelectric Resources 0.5 TW.

• Cumulative Energy of Tides and Ocean Currents < 2 TW.

• Total Geothermal Energy on Earth 12 TW.

• Maximum Amount of Extractable Wind Power 2 - 4 TW.

• 120,000 TW of Solar Radiation Strikes the Earth Surface in the form of sunlight.