Launching US Rockets From Soviet Bombers

Posted on February 4, 2022 by jlredford

In the last post I complained about how ugly the Soviet ekranoplans were. I’m glad I can now pass along a story about one of their really beautiful planes – the TU-160 supersonic bomber. It almost got used for doing air launches of Pegasus orbital rockets, but the Russians were too embarrassed to let that happen. They call it The White Swan:

At present it’s the largest and heaviest combat plane in the world, and the fastest bomber, beaten only by fighters. It’s only a little smaller than a 747, and about 2/3 the empty weight, but can go 2.3X as fast – 2200 km/hour (Mach 2.05) at 12,000 m. It has a variable swept wing, which gives it a lot of lift on takeoff and less drag at speed, and is the largest one of these ever flown. It first flew in 1981, and the USSR built 35 of them before it collapsed.

What happened next is described by Dario Leone in this recent article at The Aviation Geek Club. At the time of the collapse, 16 TU-160s ended up stranded in Ukraine. The Ukrainians were happy at first to have such a major military asset, but soon realized that they were white elephants. They need enormous amounts of fuel, and all their spare parts and maintenance know-how were back in Russia. It was originally designed to counter the US B-1A bomber (and it greatly resembles it), but the B-1A got cancelled, and Ukraine didn’t need to bomb anyone anyway. They tried to sell them back to Russia for $75M each in 1993, but the bankrupt Yeltsin administration wasn’t interested. The Russians offered tactical aircraft and munitions instead of cash, but the Ukrainians had their own financial problems.

Then the US got into the picture. The US Nunn-Lugar Act was one of the best programs of the under-appreciated Bush Sr. administration. It allocated real money ($400M a year) to dismantle nuclear weapons and their delivery systems in the former Soviet Union. It succeeded, and Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan are nuclear-free. The US offered Ukraine as much as $13M to dismantle the TU-160s, and they did take apart two of them in 1998 and 1999.

Then an even better offer came along from the US – sell us three TU-160s, and we’ll use them as launch platforms for the Pegasus rocket. This was the first orbital launch vehicle to be entirely developed with private money. It was designed by Antonio Elias at Orbital Sciences (now part of Northrop-Grumman), and first launched in 1990:

The rocket is carried up to 12 km (39,000 feet) beneath a customized Lockheed L-1011 jumbo jet, and then dropped. Its solid-fuel engine then ignites and takes a payload of up to 450 kg up to orbit. That’s not a lot, but it was the cheapest orbital launcher in the world for 20 years. Launching from a plane instead of a pad meant that it didn’t need a huge first stage, didn’t have to have perfect weather on the pad, and wasn’t tied to one launch location. That let it do a wider range or orbits too. It’s had a lot of missions, 45, but has been superseded today by the SpaceX Falcon9 (more expensive, but a lot more mass to orbit) and the RocketLab Electron (less mass, but cheaper).

The L-1011 was a passenger plane competitor to the Boeing 747, but lost out. It turned out to be perfect for this usage because it’s built with two main structural beams along the bottom instead of one. That let Orbital Sciences hang the Pegasus from two pylons, and cut holes in the bottom as slots for the rocket’s fins

So the L-1011 was fine, but could only go up to 1000 km/h. The TU-160 can get to 2000 km/h, which would give Pegasus a lot more payload, maybe twice as much. It’s more expensive to fly, and releasing the rocket at Mach 2 would be tricky, but the extra payload would greatly increase its value.

Yet selling the pride of the Russian Air Force to the Americans just made the Russians’ heads explode. They quickly cut a deal with Ukraine for all their TU-160s in return for forgiving Ukraine’s natural gas debts. The planes ended up going for about $250M, which is a lot more than the US would have paid.

The Russians also started adapting it for their own air launch service. In the 90s they were working on a two-stage liquid-fueled rocket for it called Burlak, that could have put 600 to 1100 kg into various orbits. A burlak is a peasant who hauls barges; “The Volga Boatmen” is about them. The project monies were apparently spent on “foreign cars and saunas”, and so their German satellite backers pulled out. It has recently been revived, though. They have been building new TU-160s in the 2000s and 2010s, and talking about variants such as a passenger liner or a carrier for hypersonic cruise missiles. The plane is quite active these days, with recent missions to Syria and Venezuela. The age of bombers is long gone, though, except for military showmanship.

It was breathtakingly arrogant for the US to think they could just buy these ultra-advanced planes, but hey, it was the 90s. That decade was the peak of US world influence. That power was soon squandered in the War on Terror and Katrina and the Great Recession, and is unlikely to come back again. It’s too bad that these beautiful planes have yet to find a good use, but maybe air launch rocketry, like ekranoplans, is another technology that will rise again.

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Ekranoplans are Back! Maybe. The Regent Seaglider

Posted on January 23, 2022 by jlredford

The Soviets used to build the world’s biggest and ugliest airplanes:

Lun-class Ekranoplan, first flown in 1975

They called them by the ugly term “ekranoplans”, or “screen effect” in Russian. They flew low over water, and got lift from the cushion of air between the wings and the surface, the ground effect. That meant that they could carry hundreds of tons of cargo. The plane above carried missiles in those tubes on top for use against US aircraft carriers. They only built a couple and didn’t see service for long.

Here in the 21st century, Regent Craft is building a far better-looking version, and giving it a much nicer-sounding name – a seaglider:

Unfortunately for their marketing department, it’s a prop plane, not a glider. It uses all electric propulsion – 8 props and about 500 kWh of batteries. That gives it a range of 300 km and a speed of 300 km/hour. This first model seats 12 passengers and a pilot. It’s meant for coastal transport, like Boston to Nantucket in 45 minutes. You board on a dock, taxi out of the harbor on hydrofoils, and then take off in the ocean. It flies at about 10 m, but can probably pop up to avoid small boats or low islands. It’s heavily equipped with radar for automatic obstacle avoidance.

Regent Craft is based in Boston, and the founders are from MIT and various aerospace operations like Boeing and Virgin Galactic. The CEO, Billy Thalheimer, worked on electric planes, but couldn’t get enough range to be worthwhile. The ground effect gets them twice the range for the same payload and batteries. They’ll be built by Moore Brothers in Bristol RI, a shop that specializes in marine carbon composites, but has never built a whole boat, much less a plane.

They’re backed by funds from Mark Cuban and Peter Thiel, both rather controversial figures. They already have a lot of orders, most notably 20 units for $250M from Southern Airways, an outfit in Florida. They’ll do first trials this year down in Tampa, and hope to start taking passengers in 2025.

There have been several other attempts at ekranoplans recently. NASA planned a transoceanic version in 2014. Wing Ship in South Korea built a 50-seater in 2013, but their website hasn’t changed since 2014. “Wingship” is a better name than “seaglider”, but they probably copyrighted it. WidgetWorks in Singapore actually got the Airfish 8-seater certified in 2018, but there’s been no other news.

So why is Regent more likely to succeed? It has a few points in its favor:

Pros:

  • Electric propulsion wins in lots of ways over internal combustion:
    • It’s a lot quieter and cleaner, so more places will let them dock.
    • It’s more reliable, with lots of redundancy in the motors, power packs, and inverters.
    • Flying low with IC engines means that salt water gets sucked into the air intakes, which ruins the engines.
    • It’s cheaper because it needs far less maintenance and uses energy more efficiently.
    • Batteries are on a great curve of improving cost and density, so they can steadily expand the craft’s range.
    • Everything has to be de-carbonized, even relatively minor sources like short-range flights, so they’ll be allowed when fossil fuels are banned.
  • Autonomous flying using radar is a lot easier today given the work on self-driving cars. The Soviet planes were exhausting to fly because they needed constant attention. Autonomy is much easier to do at sea than on land. since there are fewer obstacles and they’re more visible.
  • The hydrofoils let them take off in rough water. That was a problem for the Soviet versions.
  • All airports are full, so this can service lots more places than short-range planes can.
  • Transport used to be stagnant, but has been blown open by Tesla, and money is pouring in.

Still, there are some things against it:

Cons:

  • Taking 3 years to go from trials to paying passengers is ridiculously short for a brand-new design. Their backers are asking for extreme schedules.
  • Their backers have bad reputations, which might scare off serious investors. Mark Cuban is a non-technical TV personality, and Peter Thiel is an ultra-libertarian wingnut.
  • They want to certify this with the Coast Guard instead of the FAA, and that’ll be trouble when, not if, things go wrong.
  • It only flies at 10 m, so a bad wind gust can put it in the water at 180 mph. That limits the weather it can fly in, and could be a risk even on calm days.
  • The builders, Moore Brothers, are new to projects of this size and complexity.

Yet what a cool project this is! It could ultimately do Boston to New York far faster than Acela, and cheaper and cleaner than jets. In places far more dependent on ferries, like the Mediterranean, it could be a game-changer. It fits with the marine legacy of Boston and Rhode Island, and their current high tech resources. Here’s hoping they can make it work!

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How Re-industrialization Now Works: GO Lab and Wood Fiber Insulation

Posted on January 15, 2022 by jlredford

I was driving through central Maine recently, and was struck by how dreary the landscape looked. The houses and towns looked run-down, and store fronts were vacant. This is an old story about industry leaving rural areas, and can be seen almost anywhere. But then we came to the town of Madison and saw this:

GO Lab mill in Madison ME on the Kennebec River

This gigantic, new-looking factory suddenly appeared in the middle of nowhere. What could be going on here?

It’s the site of a brand-new kind of wood-processing mill from a startup called GO Lab (home page). The older brick buildings have been there for a century, and used to be a paper mill powered by hydro from the Kennebec River. The newer blue buildings were put up by a Finnish company, UPM-Kymmene, who used them to make “supercalendared” paper, a kind of low-end glossy paper used in newspaper inserts. Newspapers have been disappearing, though, so the mill closed in 2016. Various groups bought the equipment and the rights to the hydropower, but no one was employed there.

GO Lab bought the mill in 2020. They had been using small business loans and grants to explore producing low-density wood fiber insulation. These are panels used for exterior and interior insulation. They’re made from the waste softwood from lumber mills, reinforced with a glue called PMDI, and with paraffin for water resistance:

TimberHP exterior sheathing, interior fill panels, and interior batting

The tongue-and-groove boards are for the exterior sheathing of houses. The flat panels go between 2x4s for interior insulation, and the batting gets stuffed into crannies. Compared to the usual plastic foam and fiberglass panels, they:

  • Actually sequester carbon from forests, rather than using petrochemicals or letting the waste wood rot back into methane and CO2
  • Don’t emit toxic chemicals when burned; they just char slowly
  • Are permeable to water vapor and so discourage mold
  • Can be cut with ordinary tools, and the dust is safe.
  • Have excellent R-values for thermal insulation
  • Have good sound-absorbing properties for acoustic insulation

They’ve been used in Europe for the last 20 years, and are very popular there, accounting for $700M in sales. They’re bulky and hard to ship, though, and so are more expensive than plastic panels in the US. Europe is also running out of waste wood supplies.

The co-founder and president of GO Lab, Josh Henry, is a materials scientist who heard about this product a few years ago. He got his doctorate in chemistry from Columbia, did post-grad work in Sweden, and then was a prof at the Maine Maritime Academy and the University of Maine. He started the company with an architect, Matt O’Malia, in 2017. They bought a used production line from Germany and have been installing it for the last six months. Just last month they closed on an $85M bond offering from the Finance Authority of Maine. They plan to begin production in Q2 of 2023.

The state of Maine loves ventures like this, of course. It fits right into their historical industries, will employ 100 or so people, will revitalize Madison, and fits into the green economy of the future. The governor of Maine, Janet Mills, chose this factory to announce how she’ll spend federal money from the American Rescue Plan. A lot of Maine subsists now on tourism (they even call themselves Vacationland on the license plates), but the “hospitality industry” means catering to the whims of a lot of cranky and rude people, most of them from Massachusetts. It’s much better to just build things rather than have to keep up a strained smile as people complain about the WiFi.

That must be why this is being financed by the state rather than banks or venture capitalists. This kind of re-industrialization used to be routine. Products went out of fashion, and new ones with new technology just replaced them. That doesn’t seem to be happening as much. It’s so much easier to make money in software or finance that capital for straight-up manufacturing like this seems scarce. Of the 10 most valuable companies in the US, only Tesla actually makes anything here. It now takes government support to back a real economy in an out-of-the-way place like Madison.

So here’s wishing luck to GO Lab! This looks like a solid, green product that should be useful everywhere.

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Why Care That “Foundation” Is Bad?

Posted on November 29, 2021 by jlredford

The new TV miniseries “Foundation” is full of meaningless CGI, ponderous religious imagery, thudding messages about terrorism, imperialism and climate change, and dialogue so clunky that even a serious actor like Jared Harris can’t deliver it. So what? There are lots of bad TV shows. If you want better TV science fiction, go watch “The Expanse” or “For All Mankind”.

The reason to care, at least for me, is because this version shows distressing changes in the US since Isaac Asimov wrote the pieces of the original novel in the 1940s. In the novel the characters are rationalists trying to reason their way out of the chaos of a collapsing empire. After long study and close observation, they come up with a theory, psycho-history, that gives them a path forward. They face crisis after crisis in their exile on Terminus, and out-smart their opponents. Is a powerful neighboring kingdom about to conquer them? Play them off against other nearby powers. Do they then stage a counter-revolution? Use your leverage over advanced tech to undo them. Is your faux religion falling apart after local resistance? Establish commercial ties instead. Each problem is solved with wit instead of brutality. Violence is the refuge of the incompetent imperialists and feudalists.

When Asimov was writing, the old imperial and aristocratic world was destroying itself in a cataclysmic war, WW II. The US thought of itself as an upstart commercial and technological power, not an imperial one. It was a lot more like Foundation than it was the Galactic Empire.

That’s not what America is like in the 21st century. Hari Seldon is no longer a scholar; he’s a prophet. No one is said to understand his work. Then how does he know it’s right? No actual mathematician is like this. His only equal is a a girl with no background or education at all. She just intuits it somehow. People just have faith in him, not reason.

Faith is everywhere in this series, and nowhere in the novel. Asimov thought religion was bunk, and actually uses it as a con. This has a religion, Illuminism, that foretells of prophets. Even the robot believes it, and worries about whether she has a soul. What? You’d think that immortal sentient machines would have figured this out, since college sophomores do.

Out on Terminus, the leader of Foundation is no longer the wily mayor Salvor Hardin, who gets there by being elected. Instead Hardin is a lone outcast. With a gun. And superpowers. She’s a woman of color, but otherwise little different than the lone gunslinger Shane. She no longer outwits the neighboring powers – she kills them with her sniper rifle. Given that they are prone to attacking armed positions by running across flat open ground, something that infantry hasn’t done in a hundred years, they shouldn’t be that hard to fool.

At every turn the characters here look to their feelings, not their reason. Seldon actually appears at the end to tell them that the Foundation was not about curating knowledge, but curating people. What does that even mean? Strong institutions? Legal systems? Education? None of that is in evidence, because all that the TV writers think is important is emotion.

This show is the anti-Foundation. The thing that impressed so many readers over the last 70 years, including me as a kid, was how people could think their way through even the greatest catastrophes. They didn’t shoot their way out it, which is the standard trope of pulp and TV.

This wouldn’t matter, except that shooting your way out is now the standard operating procedure of the US. It used to be that it responded to aggression with some finesse. When the Soviets blocked off Berlin in 1948, the US just airlifted millions of tons of supplies into the city. They didn’t roll tanks across East Germany because that would be stupid. Yet when a maniac used passenger airliners to crash into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the US promptly attacked and tortured all the people in Afghanistan who could have given up Osama bin Laden, and then attacked an unrelated country for good measure. Apparently George W was upset that Saddam Hussein had tried to assassinate his father. That’s an emotional, TV reason to do something. Decades of imbibing TV attitudes has turned the country into idiots, and this inversion of the themes of Foundation is a pure example.

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Space vs Balloon Tourism

Posted on October 22, 2021 by jlredford

After a long hiatus, space tourism came back this year. The last trip was in 2012 to the ISS, but there have recently been four trips: two sub-orbital flights by Blue Origin in July and October, one by Virgin Galactic in July, and a four-day orbital jaunt by Inspiration 4 in a Falcon 9 in September:

New Shepard from Blue Origin, VSS Unity from Virgin Galactic, and the Inspiration 4 Dragon capsule on a SpaceX Falcon 9

The trips came in for much mockery and disdain, but I think for the wrong reasons. Let me describe those, and then talk about a better way to experience the main pleasure of this kind of travel – the awesome and inspirational view of the Earth from above.

First off, yes, the New Shepard rocket does look like a penis, and no, that’s not deliberate. That’s just the shape you get when you put a large capsule on a small rocket. The rocket is small because it needs to be cheap, and the capsule is large so that its passengers aren’t mashed on top of one another. Yes, Blue Origin is competing with SpaceX, but they’re not doing it with shapes that you see on bathroom walls. Its owner, Jeff Bezos, wants to get people excited about space again, and he figures the way to do that is to let people go there themselves. The very name Blue Origin comes from his belief that the Earth is our birthplace, but not our only home in the long run. SpaceX is taking a strictly economic approach by trying to make space as cheap as possible, and that works too. Note that the Falcon 9 is far bigger than the New Shepard, and that’s because it’s a genuine orbital rocket, not a sub-orbital hopper.

Second, yes, these trips are expensive, but it’s not much for the people involved. The sub-orbitals cost a few million, which is in the noise to billionaires like Bezos and Richard Branson (the owner of Virgin Galactic). Actually funding these companies has cost the two of them billions, but really, what else do they have to spend it on? Another cruise-ship-sized yacht? That doesn’t get you points with the club members.

The same goes for Jared Isaacman, who purchased the Inspiration 4 flight. He’s the CEO of Shift4, a company that manages credit card sales for small businesses. They do about $500M a year in gross sales with about $100M in profit. His share of the public company is estimated at $2.4B. This trip probably cost him $200M, plus he says he’ll donate $100M to a charity, St. Jude Children’s Hospital in Memphis. Aircraft are his hobby – he set the record for a round-the-world trip in a light jet, about 62 hours. He also has a company, Draken International, that has 70 fighter jets, largely foreign (E.g. MIGs), that it flies for the Air Force as opposition aircraft for training. That’s a bit sinister. This flight is a visible chunk of his net worth, but he still won’t miss it.

Third, the environmental impact of this stuff is minor. The CO2 emissions of even the largest of them, the SpaceX launch, is similar to that of a ten-hour 747 flight (about 350 tonnes), and dozens of those happen every day. All three of these vehicles are re-usable, so they’re not spreading junk all over the ocean floor as previous rockets did.

No, the real problem with these trips is that they’re crummy outings. The sub-orbitals are only 10 minutes long. In that time you get to spend a few minutes floating around in zero-gee and looking out the windows, and then they you’re done. It’s pretty much a long roller coaster ride at a million times the price.

The orbital trip has the opposite problem – it’s way too long. You’re stuck in a space the size of a bathroom with three other people for four days. You have to deal with bad food, space sickness, difficult toilets, and the interesting smells and personality quirks of your fellow travelers.

So a far better way to do this is by high-altitude balloon:

CGI of the Neptune capsule over Florida

There are several firms looking to offer this, but the furthest ahead is Space Perspective. They’re actually based on Cape Canaveral. They plan to offer 6-hour flights for $125,000 – two hours to get up to 100,000 feet (30 km), two hours to admire the incredible view, and two hours descending as the balloon deflates, and then a splashdown in the Atlantic:

Click to embiggen

They will launch before dawn, so you’ll see sunrise over the ocean. The capsule holds eight passengers, a pilot, and a bar, with a restroom below. The balloon is 200 m tall on the ground, twice the height of the Saturn V, and inflates to 15 million m3 at altitude, where it is about 200 m across.

The company has a lot of experience with balloons. They built the system that Alan Eustace used in his record-setting skydive from 136,000 feet (41 km) in 2014. Many of them were involved in the NASA super-pressure balloon program, a terrific program that I wrote about here: How Space Science Might Have Gone. The capsule manufacturing head comes from SpaceX, and has experience in luxury yacht design, which sounds like what you want for that much money.

An unmanned test happened in June 2021, and was successful. Full-up tests should happen in 2023, and first paying flights in 2024. Passengers need no training and have no health requirements beyond those needed to fly. You walk on, rise gently up, and get to see this with a drink in hand:

Taken by a GoPro on the Overlook Horizon flight.

This is what William Shatner was inspired by on his New Shepard flight this month. It’s not rockets. It’s not Humanity’s Manifest Destiny In Space. It’s our own precious home, our oasis in the void. That’s what these kind of trips can show us, and that’s worth a lot.

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The First Exa-Transistor Computer

Posted on June 5, 2021 by jlredford

That is, the first single system to have more than 1018 transistors, more than a quintillion, or 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 . It’s the Fugaku supercomputer in Japan:

I

It’s the world’s fastest machine as of November 2020, as defined by the benchmarks on the Top 500 list of supers, and is the first to break an exa-flop, doing more than 1018 floating point operations per second. It’s named after Mt Fuji, the most beautiful mountain in the world. It was built by Fujitsu using their own custom processor chips, and is operated by the RIKEN Center for Computational Science in Kobe, near Osaka. Here’s how its transistors are allocated:

FeatureTransistor countSize
Processors1.5 x 1015 160K chips with 48 cores and 8.8 billion transistors each
DRAM44 x 1015 32 GB on each chip above
Local flash storage132 x 1015 1.5 TB on each set of 16 chips
System flash storage1350 x 1015 150 PB for the whole machine, and assuming single-bit-per-transistor NAND flash
Total1.5 x 1018

The whole machine cost about a billion dollars, so that’s 1.5 billion transistors per dollar. A lot of the cost is in the chips themselves, but there’s a lot of overhead for network wiring, cabinets, and cooling. It draws 30 MW, as much as a small town.

Now, I’ve worked on about 15 processor chips in my career, and the biggest had a mere 200 million transistors, and drew 4W. My first processor in 1984 had 100 thousand transistors, and drew 10W. This is on an other-worldly scale compared to my systems.

How much is an exa? Consider that one raindrop weighs about one milligram. 1018 raindrops is a billion tonnes of water. That’s about the rainfall on New York City every year. If every transistor in Fugaku were a raindrop, it would take a year to sprinkle them across that huge city.

Or consider that a typical cellphone has 32 GB of storage, and maybe a billion of them are sold each year. That’s 300 exa-transistors. This one machine has 1/200th of all the transistors sold in all the phones.

Who built it? Riken is the leading scientific institution in Japan. It counts four Nobelists among its associates, it isolated the tastes of green tea and umami, it worked on Japan’s atomic bomb during WW II (and was destroyed because of that), and it discovered element 113 (now known as nihonium) in 2004.

Why did they build it? Supers are primarily used to do physical simulations. This is where the interactions between pieces of something obey well-known laws, but there are just so many of them that the overall behavior is unpredictable. The different parts of the simulation interact constantly, so you need a lot of bandwidth among the millions of processor cores. This is different from other big computing complexes, like Google’s or Amazon’s. Those are dealing with millions of separate, independent tasks, ones that don’t need much communication. This class of machine works on single problems and so needs a different (and much more expensive!) structure.

So what have they done with it? Recent publications from the Fugaku group include:

  • Discovering through simulation that the glycan molecules on the spike proteins of the COVID-19 virus are critical for infecting cells
  • Using machine learning to predict exactly what will flood when tsunamis hit. The Japanese in particular are very, very interested in this.
  • Doing the world’s highest resolution weather simulation, with a cell size of 3.5 km across the entire planet.

What’s next? The fastest machine on the Top 500 list has been doubling in speed every 15 months. That’s a factor of 1000 in 13 years. If the overall size of the machine scales with its speed, and it should, then the first zetta-transistor (1021) machine will be in about 2033. There’s no telling who will build it, but IBM has been high up on the list for the list’s entire 30-year history. The first yotta-transistor (1024) machine would come in 2046, just in time for the climate catastrophe to be in full swing, and in full need of simulation. After that, the metric system runs out of prefixes!

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Every Thing Can Be Improved – GRK Fasteners

Posted on May 8, 2021 by jlredford

Here’s a story of tech success by immigrants with a rather sad ending – that of the wood screw maker GRK Fasteners. I came across these products in Home Depot, where they get a whole bay to themselves:

They’re the best screws I’ve ever used! They have star heads, are self-tapping (meaning they start their own holes), are made from tough case-hardened steel, and are plated against rust and corrosion from treated lumber:

The first couple of threads have little W cuts in them to help saw through the wood. The star bits grip so well that you can hold a screw horizontally on the driver and it won’t fall off. They’re way better than Philips, never mind the absurd slotted head. The wide flat head sets against the wood, clamping the piece down.

Metal screws have been common for over 200 years. How is it that people are still improving on them? Who came up with this? The boxes have little black-red-yellow German flags on them, and they’re called Uber-grade. Is this another case of Germans looking at a problem carefully and doing it right?

Not quite. The company was founded by a guy named Uli Walther. He had been working for a German screw company called Reisser, and living in Switzerland, and they wanted him to open a North American office. He looked around the continent and settled on Thunder Bay, Ontario, a town on the northwestern edge of Lake Superior. It connects rail lines from western Canada to shipping on the Great Lakes, and is also a significant industrial center, notably of Bombardier light rail cars. Walther liked it because of the good amenities and its German immigrant population. He moved his family there in 1990. Meanwhile Reisser tried to expand into East Germany after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and promptly went bankrupt in 1992. The Walthers were left high and dry in a foreign land. But Uli still knew a lot about screws, and had contacts in Taiwan for the actual manufacturing. He started GRK in 1993 with money from local investors.

They had a hard slog in the 1990s. His sons worked at the plant starting in high school. Uli started to file patents on screw features in 1996, and ultimately got 5 US patents, the last in 2002. He and his son Mirco filed the most significant one in 1999, US 6,152,666, that patented the W-shaped saw cuts in the threads. Mirco took over the company in the 2000s, and has 5 patents himself. They did well in the 2000s, selling to independent hardware stores and contractors, and opening their own manufacturing plant in Thunder Bay. They even opened a German subsidiary. The biggest hiccup came in 2004 when the Canadian government imposed a punitive tariff on their Taiwanese imports, largely at the request of China. They fought the tariff for 5 years and finally got it overturned.

By the 2010s, Uli wanted to retire, so the company was sold in 2011 to a conglomerate, Illinois Tool Works, which has a lot of fastener lines. They then closed a deal with Home Depot to offer them across the continent, and that established their brand. ITW promised to keep the Thunder Bay factory open, but closed it three years later in 2014. Everything is now made in Taiwan, and there’s nothing of GRK in Thunder Bay any more.

So the Walthers came to the New World and used their experience and ingenuity to build something genuinely new and advanced, only to be shut down by global capital. Both parts of their story are fortunately and unfortunately common.

But there’s s sequel! Uli could not stay idle in retirement, and started a new firm, U2 Fasteners, in 2016. They have even more advanced features, like a bulge on the shaft that opens the wood up as it screws in, and little cutters under the cap that improve the counter-sinking. Here he is at a trade show with a model of one of his products:

They’re not sold at Home Depot, but contractors love them and there’s even a screw-off video comparing U2 and GRK on YouTube. Here’s hoping that all the Walthers keep advancing the state of the art!

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The Really Dangerous Tech is Really Old

Posted on April 19, 2021 by jlredford

Here’s an odd thing – the technology that is really dangerous today all comes from the 1950s and earlier. The big inventions of the last 60 years are nowhere near as deadly as the ones from earlier, especially those from the first half of the 20th century. That period had the worst wars in human history, so maybe that’s not surprising. But what we see is that the really bad stuff from that period is almost all heavily regulated now. The worst problems of today are social, not technical.

Let me illustrate this by describing some tech that really harms a lot of people, and when it was developed:

Deliberately Dangerous Tech

  • Sarin, the worst chemical weapon, was developed in 1939 in Germany but even the Nazis didn’t use it. It did get used by some of the most brutal regimes since then: Pinochet’s Chile, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, and Bashar Assad’s Syria. It’s what the lunatic cult of Aum Shinrikiyo used to terrorize Tokyo in 1995. It’s 80 times more lethal than cyanide, and 500 times more than chlorine. The name comes from the initials of the last names of the chemists who created it, which is about the worst memorial ever. It is classified as a WMD and was outlawed by the UN Chemical Weapons Convention of 1997.
  • Anthrax, the worst biological weapon, was used by Imperial Japan in China in the 1930s and weaponized by the UK in 1942, who poisoned Gruinard Island in Scotland with it. It has since mainly killed people who worked with it or near it. Outlawed by the Biological Weapons Convention in 1975.
  • Nuclear Weapons, the highest energy weapons ever developed, in 1945 (fission) and 1949 (fusion) by the US. They have only been used once, at the end of WW II, because they’re useless for actual military purposes. The goal of war is domination, not destruction. Nuclear stockpiles peaked in the mid 1980s and are now down to 10% of previous levels. Desperate loser countries like North Korea still work on them, but no one else does, and their tritium triggers are actually decaying over time.
  • Assault rifles, have killed more people in the last 50 years than any other weapon. They were introduced by Germany in 1944 as the SturmGewehr 44 because standard rifles were overpowered for typical engagements. What was needed was a high rate of fire, not accuracy at long ranges. The big breakthrough was in 1949 with the AK-47, a gun that worked in any condition. Ones have been found recently in Afghanistan that were made in 1953. It actually appears on the flag of Mozambique, and is one of the main legacies of the Soviet Union. They’re too widespread at this point for any kind of international control, although most countries have kept them out of civilian hands. Not the US, though, as is now demonstrated weekly.
  • Cluster bombs, the worst kind of munition, since they kill over a wide range and leave lots of unexploded ordinance behind. This was yet another innovation of WW II, with versions from Germany, the US, and the USSR. Attempts have been made to outlaw them, but the major military powers, including the US, still use them regularly.

Then there is tech that was NOT deliberately designed to kill, but has caused a lot of damage even so:

Accidentally Dangerous Tech

  • Leaded gasoline – has damaged IQs all over the world, and is likely responsible for the crime wave of the 1980s and 90s. Lead exposure harms neural development in children, and there is a distinct dropoff in crime about 20 years after lead is disallowed in fuel, when lead-free children mature. It was developed in the 1920s to permit cheaper fuel to burn cleanly in cars. It was disallowed in 1976 in the US, and in the 90s in Europe, but is still used in some places.
  • Bisphenol A (BPA) – could be damaging human fertility, since it mimics the hormone estrogen and is an endocrine disruptor. Male sperm counts have dropped substantially in recent decades, and some associate that with BPA. It has distinct effects in mice studies, but the human studies have been too varied to settle on conclusions. It was first prepared in 1891 in Russia, and came into widespread use in the 1930s. It’s now used to make clear, tough polycarbonate plastics for things like water bottles, and in epoxy resins. Regulatory bodies in the US and Europe are just now recommending against its use, but environmentally-conscious consumers already avoid them.
  • Chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) – release free chlorine atoms when they’re hit by ultraviolet in the upper atmosphere, and the chlorines then catalyze the destruction of a lot of ozone (O3). Since ozone is what mainly prevents UV from striking the surface, and UV is dangerous to all living things, this is highly bad. It wasn’t until the 1970s that Antarctic and satellite imagery could detect what was happening, and a treaty banning their use, the Montreal Protocol of 1976, was quickly put into place. It was a rare example of industry readily allowing regulation, and was made possible by the dire consequences of ozone depletion and the ready availability of substitutes.

So what recent technologies could be dangerous?

Possibly Dangerous New Tech

  • Genetic engineering, could be used to make even more deadly plagues than anthrax. See James Tiptree’s story The Last Flight of Doctor Ain (1968), for an early and brilliant take on this. But superbugs have all the problems of nuclear weapons in terms of being indiscriminate and with uncontrollable side effects, and can’t even have targeted releases. They’re stupid as a weapon, and too difficult for terrorists to develop compared to much easier tech like sarin.
  • AI, as in sentient machines that decide they don’t want to share the earth with us. The gleaming skeleton of the Terminator scared the dickens out of people, but I’ve never understood this trope. There isn’t a single self-reproducing machine on earth, and no one is working on them. All machines are made for some human purpose, not one of their own. Machines that do what they want are called industrial accidents, and are highly frowned upon. There is current computer software that is called AI by the nontechnical press because it mimics neural networks, but it doesn’t even appear to be changing productivity statistics, much less turning us all into serfs.
  • Transhumanism, where people are enhanced by biological or machine methods to become oppressive overlords, the Red Skull trope. You only have to look at people with actual prosthetics to see how sad this is. They’re getting better, but are tragically far from even matching what normal bodies can do, much less exceeding them.

I do see a couple of things based on new technology that could be dangerous:

Likely Dangerous New Tech

  • Omni-surveillance, which is now being used to oppress the Uighurs in the Xinjiang province of China. Cheap networked cameras and machine learning algorithms can keep track of millions of people without needing vast numbers of expensive human guards. A whole region can be turned into an open-air concentration camp. This appeared first in China because it’s a technically advanced country with few human rights, but can be replicated in a lot of places.
  • Drone soldiers, both aerial and land-bound. Aerial drones were used a lot by ISIS in Syria to carry explosives. Legged robots are getting to the point where they really could replace people in breaking down doors and attacking settlements. The seminal work here is Forever Peace (1997) by Joe Haldeman, where drones allow the US to conduct Vietnam-like counter-insurgency all over the world without the US civilian population knowing or caring. They’re wildly expensive today, but tech that works always becomes cheaper and more widely available as it’s developed.

Anyway, what I see from these lists is that the really efficient means of killing were driven by the World Wars. A lot of tech with dangerous side-effects was developed in the Second Industrial Revolution of the early 20th century, when people were happy to just get things that worked, never mind the consequences. By the later 20th century, those consequences became much more apparent, and the tech was much more regulated. The Third Industrial Revolution of integrated circuits and computers, working medicines, and worldwide travel and shipping, has had far fewer bad effects.

The actual serious problems of today, like environmental damage, oppressive oligarchy, and the many kinds of discrimination, are not particularly technical. They’re mainly due to entrenched interests defending their income and privilege. Those are political and social issues, and much harder to change. We know how to fix the technical problems, and have done it in the past. Current tech trends will bring some new issues, but they pale compared to the political problems.

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Good News on Backstopping Renewables (3) – Eavor Advanced Geothermal

Posted on March 21, 2021 by jlredford

The last posts were about batteries and pumped-hydro storage, which will be used to handle excess energy from variable renewables. But what happens when there’s no sun or wind for weeks on end? There still needs to be something to provide baseload power. Currently that’s done by nuclear and gas-powered plants, but nuclear is way expensive, and gas plants leak the powerful greenhouse gas methane, and emit CO2 as they burn. There are some other renewable resources still coming on-line, such as big hydro-power projects in northern Quebec, and some interesting work around tidal power plants, but more alternatives would be good.

Enter Eavor, who have a scheme for tapping the Earth’s heat in a much wider range of places than can be done at present:

Credt: Eavor

They drill down to a hot layer, which may be kilometers under the surface, then take a right angle turn and go horizontally for a while. They put out multiple horizontal legs to maximize the surface area. Then they drill a second well next to the first, also with horizontal legs, and carefully connect them at the ends. Cold fluid sinks down the blue well, gets heated up, and rises up the red, where it can be used for process heat or to turn a generator.

The temperature out determines how well this works. Getting 200C is enough for some power, and for industrial heating applications and greenhouses. Getting 300C gets really efficient power generation, but usually means going a lot deeper. Well drilling is an O(N2 ) process, since the deeper you go the harder it is to turn the bit and to get the pipe in and out. That means that deep wells are far more expensive, so you better be sure you’re going to get really hot fluid back up.

The whole system is sealed, with no fluids going in or out of the rock. They use a proprietary casing called Rock-Pipe on the wells. This gets around a problem with geothermal at present, where tapping hot brine can cause the ground to shift in earthquakes, or perturb water levels. Having an open-loop system may not be as bad as the opponents of fracking claim, but a closed-loop scheme avoids the issue entirely.

They make a point of not using pumps to drive the fluid down, saying that that costs too much energy. They rely instead of “thermo-siphoning”, where fluid expands and rises as it heats up. They also don’t say what the fluid is, so maybe its thermal expansion factor is really high.

The key problem here is getting the wells to connect up when they’re kilometers underground. This is called Wellbore Intersection, and is apparently a standard service these days. They use something called Magnetic Ranging Technology, and one scheme for that looks like this:

Credit: Oil & Gas Journal, 2004

After drilling one well, you put a sensor package down it that generates a magnetic field. A rotating magnet sensor in the second well can then pick up the first’s direction and distance, and guide the drill bit. You go as far as you can, and then guide the second well to connect with the first. It’s astonishing that this works.

Eavor has done one demo already in Alberta to test out the concept. They’re only aiming for 70C, but it’s just a demo. They’ve cut deals with firms in Bavaria and the Netherlands, and those should start soon. They recently raised $40M from BP and Chevron. That’s nice, but will only take them for one or two more wells. Their management team is mainly from Alberta, and look to be old hands at drilling. They’ve just brought an interesting guy onto their board, a Dutch professor of petroleum engineering from the University of Texas. He has been working on directional drilling for a long time.

All of this shows another advantage of this approach – it taps into the huge expertise and resources available in the oil & gas sector. There are lots of people who can do this once the tech is profitable. There are lots of oil companies that are looking at doom when (not if) fossil fuels are phased out, but could switch over to this and still have a future. There are lots of places like Texas and Alberta that are now striving mightily to hold back the renewables revolution, but could get their place at the table with this.

But it’s early days! It’s not clear in how many places this will work, or whether it’s economic. Everything gets cheaper as it’s scaled up, but first you have to show that it’s practical and reliable. Here’s wishing them luck!

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Good News on Backstopping Renewables (2) – Closed-Loop Pumped Hydro

Posted on January 31, 2021 by jlredford

The Ambri batteries mentioned in the last post are fine for storing some energy for a couple of days, but suppose you need a lot of storage for a week or more. That’ll be necessary when all the fossil fuel peaker plants have to closed in order to go 100% renewable.

This is where pumped-hydro comes in. It’s a dead-simple scheme – pump water uphill when there’s excess power, and let it flow down again through a generator when you need power. It’s been in use since 1907, and is far and away the largest form of storage, accounting for 1.6 terawatt-hours (TWh) worldwide, and 250 gigawatt-hours (GWh) in the US.

There’s a big pumped hydro system right here in Massachusetts – Northfield Mountain:

About Hydroelectric Power - First Light Power Resources
Upper reservoir of the Northfield Mountain Pumped Hydro Plant

It was the largest in the world when it opened in 1972. It’s been upgraded over time, and can now generate 1.1 GW for up to 7 hours. That’s the same output as the Seabrook nuclear power plant, and is about 9% of the entire New England load. Its lower reservoir is on the Connecticut River. The pump / generators are in a vertical shaft beneath it, and a horizontal tunnel runs from there out to the river. The upper lake can store 21 million tonnes of water with a 210 m head, allowing it to store a theoretical peak of 12 GWh. It was actually built to store the nighttime output of the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant, allowing it to run at the same rate all the time regardless of demand, but that reactor closed in 2014 due to low electricity prices from shale gas and constant protests. Doing this much storage with batteries at an aggressive price of $100/kWh would cost almost a billion dollars.

So pumped facilities like this are great for intermittent wind and solar power, but hardly any new ones are being built. This is mainly because high hills next to rivers are not common, and because tunnels are expensive.

A team at Australia National University in Canberra have been working on the first problem, and recently published a nice study on just where systems like this can be built: “GIS Algorithms to Locate Prospective Sites for Pumped Hydro Energy Storage” by Bin Lu et al, Applied Energy, July 2018. What they’ve done is to use Geographic Information Systems (GIS) to identify places that would be suitable to schemes like this. We now have data on the height and characteristics of every square meter of land on the planet, and so can use it to find places that:

  • Are at least 300 m above another spot that is within a 1:15 slope nearby. If the slope is shallower than that, the tunnel between the reservoirs is too long.
  • Could hold at least a million m3 of water.
  • Have a height and volume that gives a storage capacity of at least 1 GWh
  • Has an area of at least 10 hectares (300 m on a side, a small lake) for both the upper and lower reservoirs
  • Is not in an already protected area such as a park
  • Is not already under intensive use like residences
  • Would need dams of limited height and limited amount of excavation
  • Are near existing transmission lines

They then looked for sites to build two kinds of reservoirs:

a) Dry gullies – where there’s a slope that can be dammed. The dam should be no more than 40 m high.

b) Turkey nests – flat areas where excavated dirt can be piled up to form the dam. The sides should be no more than 20m high. Turkeys build their nests this way on flat ground.

(a) Dry gulley scheme, (b) Turkey nest scheme

The big difference between their work and previous efforts is that they did NOT assume there had to be a river nearby. In fact they call it STORES: Short-term Off-River Energy Storage. This greatly increases the number of available sites. This would be a closed-loop system – the water would be pumped back and forth between the reservoirs rather than flowing through. The reservoirs could be filled from a temporary pipeline, and then maintained by trucks or rain catchment arrangements on the slope between the reservoirs.

They applied this to the province of South Australia. It already gets over half of its power from solar and wind. It has a big transmission line to connect to the rest of the country, but when that goes down, they get blackouts. Having local storage would be a huge help to them, and let them go 100% green. The study found 190 sites like the above, with a total capacity of 276 GWh. Modern people consume an average of 1 kW each, so the two million people South Australia use an average of 2 GW. Give them 20 hours of storage and they need 40 GWh. The study found over 5X that!

They also applied the same GIS search to the US and found this:

Data from the Global Pumped Hydro Atlas as part of the RE100 project at ANU. Click to embiggen.

There’s an embarrassment of riches! Basically all the hilly parts of the continent can do something. If we zoom in on western New England, more detail can be seen:

Western New England sites

This map is centered on Mount Greylock in the Berkshires. Now you can see the reservoirs themselves and the tunnels needed. The red dots are the best. There are lots of good sites just north of Greylock in southern Vermont, and lots just to the west in New York. Eastern Massachusetts is too flat, but New Hampshire and Maine have good sites too.

So a surprising number of places could be used for pumped hydro. How about the second problem, the cost of tunneling? A lot of these sites have reservoirs that are quite far apart. Michael Barnard, a clean tech expert and author, proposed that Elon Musk Should Build Pumped Hydro With Tesla Energy, The Boring Co., & Coal Miners. Musk’s Boring Machine company aims to dig relatively small tunnels, ones only 4.3 m (14′) in diameter, for single lane underground traffic routes. That would also be a good size for these pumped hydro tunnels. The pumped hydro projects themselves would be a good addition to his solar projects.

Plus, there are a lot of pumped hydro sites in places like West Virginia and Wyoming, where laid-off coal miners could put their skills to use in a new industry. It needs people who can handle the machinery for tunneling and excavation, and doesn’t give you black lung while doing it. If we really do need to get 20 kWh of storage per person, then the US will need 6.8 TWh of it for 340M people. That’s 27 times what it has today. That sounds like a lot of good work for a lot of people!

So modern information systems in the form of GIS, and modern advances in technology like electric tunneling machines, could give us a way to really get 100% green. Just as the improvements in solar panels and wind turbines have made renewable electricity cheaper than coal, similar progress can give us a place to put all this cheap energy. We don’t have all that long to get going on this!

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