Month: November 2021

Entrepreneurs Explore Using Hydrogen to Fuel Future Airplanes

(p. B4) A fully fueled Boeing 787-10 Dreamliner can fly roughly 8,000 miles while ferrying 300 or so passengers and their luggage. A battery with the energy equivalent to that fuel would weigh about 6.6 million pounds. That’s why — despite environmental advantages — we don’t have battery-powered electric airliners.

But aviation companies working to make cleaner aircraft are exploring the use of hydrogen, the world’s most abundant element, to power both electric and combustion engines — and to make air travel more eco-friendly

. . .

When Val Miftakhov founded ZeroAvia to develop electric aircraft, he first considered battery power. A Siberian émigré and physicist, his earlier start-up converted gasoline cars to electric, then incorporated an improved charging system. But batteries can sustain only the shortest excursions, like training flights. . . .

ZeroAvia instead chose fuel cells, which are essentially a chemical battery that substitutes lighter-than-air hydrogen for the weighty lithium ion. Hydrogen is notable for its energy density — the amount of energy per kilogram — which is about three times that of jet fuel. The byproduct of burning hydrogen is water. Hydrogen can be made from water and renewable energy, although most is now made from natural gas, which is not particularly green.

Mr. Miftakhov acknowledged that hydrogen storage containers, which were generally designed for ground transportation, were not practical for aircraft. “We need to focus on reducing the weight,” he said, “We have some fairly low-hanging fruit.”

For the full story, see:

Roy Furchgott. “Will Hydrogen Be Aviation’s Eco-Friendly Fuel?” The New York Times (Tuesday, Nov. 16, 2021): B4.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the story was updated Nov. 22, 2021, and has the title “Can Hydrogen Save Aviation’s Fuel Challenges? It’s Got a Way to Go.”)

Entrepreneur Wedgewood “Was Encouraged to Question Authority”

(p. C6) During this pandemic, the upper-middle class went bonkers over pots. They clanged them nightly on the street in homage to health care workers, and as soon as they were loosed from quarantine they marched into studios like eager kindergartners to create their own ceramics. Perhaps these hobbyists whose uneven, sometimes Seussian efforts fill Instagram “shelfies” — Seth Rogen, I’m talking to you — could find #inspo in a new biography of the 18th-century potter Josiah Wedgwood. It encourages the rest of us to look at our crockery more critically.

. . .

And production of the veddy English Wedgwood, which used to occur in Stoke-on-Trent, Staffordshire, is now largely outsourced to Asia, the very continent it was founded to compete with.

. . .

Josiah was born the youngest of a dozen children into a primitive, churchy iteration of the business. He walked seven miles round-trip to school by the age of 6 — take that, TikTok tots — and was encouraged to question authority. The loss of one leg (weakened by smallpox, further damaged in a road accident and finally amputated and replaced with a wooden prosthetic) helped form his character, like Captain Ahab’s. Unable to labor at the wheel, Wedgwood would gravitate instead to design and labor reform: “a hands-on manager,” writes Hunt, who compares him to Steve Jobs, “overseeing his potbanks with a steely professionalism.”

. . .

More seriously, Hunt offers convincing evidence that Wedgwood, . . . , was a committed if somewhat armchair abolitionist, alert to the horrors of the triangular trade that undergirded his commerce, especially the sugar that was also known as “white gold.” His widely circulated and copied cameo featuring a kneeling slave with the motto “Am I Not a Man and a Brother?” though regrettably generic, “deserves to be remembered as one of the most radical symbols in modern history,” Hunt argues. (Incorporated into snuffbox lids, bracelets and hair pins, it could also be seen as an early example of virtue signaling.)

On top of everything, Wedgwood was a devoted family man: “uxorious” to and solicitous of his wife and third cousin, Sarah, he helped to home-school their brood even though there wasn’t a pandemic at the time. (. . . ) Alas, he didn’t live to see the birth of his grandson: Charles Darwin.

For the full review, see:

Alexandra Jacobs. “A Master of Making Fine China, and a Firebrand Too.” The New York Times (Monday, October 25, 2021): C6.

(Note: ellipses, added; italics, in original.)

(Note: the online version of the review has the date Oct. 24, 2021, and has the title “A Transporting and Cozy Biography of a Pottery Pioneer.”)

The book under review is:

Hunt, Tristram. The Radical Potter: The Life and Times of Josiah Wedgwood. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2021.

Firms Nimbly Pivot to Build Innovative Products That Use Fewer Chips

(p. A1) Manufacturers struggling with a shortage of semiconductor chips are finding workarounds, executives said, redesigning products, shipping uncompleted units and focusing on older, lower-tech models.

. . .

Boss Products typically used hand-held controls with computer chips to angle snow truck blades. The company, which is owned by Toro Co., hasn’t been able to find enough chips. So employees started looking for ways to use fewer of them. Some remembered that joysticks, without computer chips, were used to control these features until electronics became affordable and commonplace.

“Let’s go back to the old design,” said Rick Rodier, a Toro executive. “It still does the job. It was done this way for 30 years. It was reliable. It was fine. It was just a little more cumbersome to build and assemble.”

. . .

(p. A6) T3 Motion, which makes electric stand-up vehicles for airport and university security officers, is redesigning its products to use fewer computer chips and electronics.

William Tsumpes, the company’s CEO, said instead of multiple components to control features like batteries, lighting and sirens, the redesigned vehicle will use a centralized, integrated board with a single processor to control all the parts of the vehicle. This move will eliminate the other five individual circuit boards, he said. Mr. Tsumpes said it was tough to quickly execute the redesign, but the moves, and an engine change, will lead to increased vehicle range.

“It’s spurring innovation,” Mr. Tsumpes said.

For the full story, see:

Austen Hufford. “Chip Shortage Leads to Redesigned Products.” The Wall Street Journal (Monday, Nov. 15, 2021): A1 & A6.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date November 14, 2021, and has the title “Chip Shortage Sees Manufacturers Pitch Lower-Tech Models.”)

New Nuclear Designs Are “Cheap, Efficient, Extremely Reliable”, “Nearly Carbon-Free” and Much Safer

(p. A17) Jacopo Buongiorno, a nuclear-engineering professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has calculated that over the life cycle of power plants, which includes construction, mining, transport, operation, decommissioning and disposal of waste, the greenhouse-gas emissions for nuclear power are 1/700th those of coal, 1/400th of gas, and one-fourth of solar. Nuclear also requires 1/2,000th as much land as wind and around 1/400th as much as solar. For any given power output, the amount of raw material used to build a nuclear plant is a small fraction of an equivalent solar or wind farm. Although nuclear waste is obviously more difficult to dispose of, its volume is 1/10,000th that of solar and 1/500th of wind. This includes abandoned infrastructure and all the toxic substances that end up in landfills. One person’s lifetime use of nuclear power would produce about a half-ounce of waste. Even including the Chernobyl disaster, human mortality from coal is 2,000 to 3,000 times that of nuclear, while oil claims 400 times as many lives.

Although the federal government tends to resist nuclear power, many nuclear technologies are being investigated and funded by private capital including molten-salt reactors, liquid-metal reactors, advanced small modular reactors, microreactors and much more. More than 70 development projects are under way in the U.S., with many designs intended to create assembly-line construction facilities to simplify and standardize testing, licensing and installations. One appealing approach is to replace large-scale facilities with many smaller but safer, cheaper and more-manageable ones. The $10 billion 10-year planning and implementation cycle for a large nuclear plant can be cut in half with a small modular reactor and another half with a microreactor.

. . .

Nuclear power is cheap, efficient, extremely reliable and nearly carbon-free. New designs, including smaller reactors, drastically reduce the risk of large-scale radioactive contamination.

. . .

Sacrifice isn’t always the path to progress.

For the full commentary, see:

Andrew I. Fillat and Henry I. Miller. “Nuclear Power Is the Best Climate-Change Solution by Far.” The Wall Street Journal (Friday, Nov. 5, 2021): A17.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date November 4, 2021, and has the same title as the print version.)

“Precautionary Principle Would Have Vastly Slowed” Anesthesia, Antibiotics, Chemotherapy and Other Medical Innovations

(p. 15) In his new book, “You Bet Your Life,” Paul A. Offit wants to understand the failures and tragedies that help pave the way to medical innovation. For most of human history, anesthesia did not exist. Patients had to be forcibly restrained while their limbs were amputated and their cancers were removed, typically amid piercing screams and unbearable agony. Things did not start to change until the 1840s, when a carnival barker named Gardner Colton charged people 25 cents to sniff “laughing gas,” also known as nitrous oxide, which made them fall down in hysterics and then go to sleep for a few minutes. On Dec. 10, 1844, a dentist named Horace Wells attended Colton’s show. Soon after inhaling the gas (and making a fool of himself), he told a friend that a person could probably “have a tooth extracted or a limb amputated and not feel any pain.”

Wells sought out Colton immediately after the show, and the very next day, he became the first person to use nitrous oxide as an anesthetic: He asked a fellow dentist to extract one of his own teeth. The procedure was painless. Over the following weeks, Wells used nitrous oxide on 15 of his patients. It worked every time. In January 1845, he asked if he could demonstrate his method to specialists in a large amphitheater at the Massachusetts General Hospital. The demonstration failed. Wells gave too little of the anesthetic to his patient, who woke up during the extraction, in intense pain and screaming. Members of the audience shouted out, “Humbug!” Wells was disgraced.

. . .

Offit is a good storyteller, and he has some terrific stories to tell. He also draws important lessons. In the domain of medical innovation, tragedies cannot be prevented, no matter how many regulations we put in place. Science moves forward in fits and starts, with blunders, failures and losses along the way. New discoveries are rarely immediate; we inevitably learn more over time. Ours is not a risk-free world, which means that we need to choose the lesser risk. New technologies are always a gamble.

All of those claims are true, but I think that Offit also pulls out an even deeper and more provocative moral from this history. In life and in public policy, many people in Europe and the United States are drawn to the “precautionary principle,” which essentially calls for a high degree of risk aversion: Whenever an innovation threatens to cause harm, we should be exceedingly cautious before we allow it. Offit’s examples, and the history of medical advances, demonstrate that in its most extreme forms, the precautionary principle is self-defeating. Simply put, precautions kill. Whether we are speaking of anesthesia, heart transplants, antibiotics, chemotherapy or blood transfusions, the precautionary principle would have vastly slowed down innovations that, yes, carried serious risk and led to real harm, but were ultimately a great boon to humanity.

For the full review, see:

Cass R. Sunstein. “Side Effects.” The New York Times Book Review (Sunday, October 17, 2021): 15.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

(Note: the online version of the review was updated Oct. 25, 2021, and has the title “A History of Medical Innovation That Doesn’t Ignore the Side Effects.”)

The book under review is:

Offit, Paul A. You Bet Your Life: From Blood Transfusions to Mass Vaccination, the Long and Risky History of Medical Innovation. New York: Basic Books, 2021.

California Labor and Environment Policies Reduce Nimble Response to Supply Chain Backups

(p. A17) The backup of container ships at the Long Beach and Los Angeles ports has grown in recent weeks despite President Biden’s intervention to get terminal operators to move goods 24/7.

. . .

The two Southern California ports handle only about 40% of containers entering the U.S., mostly from Asia. Yet ports in other states seem to be handling the surge better. Gov. Ron DeSantis said last month that Florida’s seaports had open capacity. So what’s the matter with California? State labor and environmental policies.

Some 20 business groups recently asked Gov. Gavin Newsom to declare a state of emergency and suspend labor and environmental laws that are interfering with the movement of goods. Opening the Port of Los Angeles 24 hours a day “alone will do little without immediate action from the state to address other barriers that have created bottlenecks at the ports, warehouses, trucking, rail, and the entire supply chain,” they wrote.

One barrier is a law known as AB5. Before its enactment in 2019, tens of thousands of truck drivers worked as independent contractors, which gave them more autonomy and flexibility than if they were employees. As contractors, truck drivers can work for multiple companies, which allows them to nimbly respond to surges in demand.

. . .

Another problem: a shortage of storage space. “There is absolutely no available capacity in the warehousing sector due to the difficulty in developing any new capacity,” the businesses noted in their letter. The vacancy rate for warehouses near the Los Angeles and Long Beach ports was a mere 1%, compared with 3.6% nationwide.

If warehouses don’t have space in their facilities or parking lots to unload goods, drivers can’t make deliveries. Some truck drivers are leaving container boxes along with the chassis outside storage facilities and are picking them up later, but that results in a shortage of chassis at the ports. (About half of chassis are leased to truckers from a common pool supplied by private companies.)

. . .

. . . in California warehouse growth ignited opposition from environmental groups, which complain of pollution and noise. Many cities have limited new logistics facilities.

For the full commentary, see:

Allysia Finley. “California Is the Supply Chain’s Weakest Link.” The Wall Street Journal (Friday, Nov. 5, 2021): A17.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date November 4, 2021, and has the same title as the print version.)

Young People With “More Dignity Than Fear” Continue to Protest Cuba’s “Lack of Freedom”

(p. A9) Four months after a wave of spontaneous demonstrations against Cuba’s 62-year-old Communist regime, civic groups and dissidents are defying authorities with protests inside high-security prisons and plans for peaceful rallies across the nation to demand democracy.

Despite facing a crackdown that includes forced exile, summary trials and prison sentences of as much as 25 years, government critics ranging from artists to doctors have openly expressed discontent on social media.

. . .

The arrests have done seemingly little to discourage an increasingly organized and determined opposition movement, fueled by a wave of anger in the island nation over its lack of freedom and the government’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic, as well as the country’s sharpest economic contraction since the early 1990s.

. . .

“They have sicced prosecutors on us, and threatened us with expulsion from work and universities, but I think many young people have more dignity than fear,” said Yunior García, a playwright and founder of Archipiélago, a rights group with more than 31,000 members on Facebook that requested permission for the demonstration.

. . .

In an unusual show of public criticism, doctors—long considered the pride of Cuba’s revolution—posted videos on social media complaining about dismal work conditions.

For the full story, see:

José de Córdoba and Santiago Pérez. “In Cuba, Protest Amid Threat Of Prison, Exile.” The Wall Street Journal (Tuesday, Nov. 9, 2021): A9.

(Note: the online version of the story has the date November 8, 2021, and has the title “Cuba’s Dissidents Dig In Despite Government Crackdown.” When there was a slight difference in wording in the versions, the passages quoted above follow the print version.)

China Adds to Coal Use, While Already Burning More than Rest of World Combined

(p. B1) LINFEN, China — Desperate to meet its electricity needs, China is opening up new coal production exceeding what all of Western Europe mines in a year, at a tremendous cost to the global effort to fight climate change.

The campaign has unleashed a flurry of activity in China’s coal country. Idled mines are restarting. Cottage-sized yellow backhoes are clearing and widening roads past terraced cornfields. Long columns of bright red freight trucks are converging on the region to haul the extra cargo.

China’s push will carry a high cost. Burning coal, already the world’s single biggest cause of human-driven climate change, will increase China’s emissions and toxic air pollution.

. . .

China is expanding mines to produce 220 million metric tons a year of extra coal, a nearly 6 percent rise from last year. China already digs up and burns more coal than the rest of the world combined.

The effort is infused with patriotism. “Guarantee the supply” has become a national slogan, appearing frequently now in state media and official statements and even on red banners on the front of coal trucks.

. . .

(p. B4) Coal shortages were not China’s only electricity problem by September. A lack of rain in southwestern China meant hydroelectric dams generated less power. Calm skies in northeastern China meant wind turbines also contributed less.

Coal prices nearly doubled. Utilities, prevented from raising prices, began running power plants less. Blackouts followed as China’s factories ran flat out to meet strong demand. Heavy rains and flooding in Shanxi in early October briefly delayed China’s initial ability to dig extra coal. The Shanxi government said on Thursday [October 28, 2021] that all but four mines have reopened.

Officials have responded by partially deregulating electricity tariffs. Depending on the province, energy-intensive industries like steel or chemicals production now face cost increases of as much as 50 percent. That may prompt them to embrace energy efficiency, said Yan Qin, a lead analyst at Refinitiv, a data provider.

For the full story, see:

Keith Bradsher. “China Hurries to Burn More Coal, Putting Climate Goals at Risk.” The New York Times (Friday, October 29, 2021): B1 & B4.

(Note: ellipses, and bracketed date, added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date Oct. 28, 2021, and has the same title as the print version.)