Reading List 01/17/2026
ALARA, OLED screens, bus stop frequency, Ozempic and airlines, and more.
Welcome to the reading list, a weekly roundup of news and links related to buildings, infrastructure, and industrial technology. This week we look at ALARA, OLED screens, bus stop frequency, Ozempic and airlines, and more. Roughly 2/3rds of the reading list is paywalled, so for full access become a paid subscriber.
Is ALARA dead?
Nuclear advocates have long railed against ALARA, the nuclear power safety requirement that demands radiation exposure be “As Low As Reasonably Achievable”. Pro nuclear folks argue that this is based on a bad model of the harms of radiation, the linear no-threshold model (which states that there’s no ‘safe’ level of radiation, even minute amounts can potentially cause harm), and that in practice “reasonable” means safety requirements will perpetually escalate, undoing any efforts to find cheaper, more efficient ways to build reactors.
Now it looks like the US Department of Energy is removing ALARA. Via E&E News:
Energy Secretary Chris Wright killed the Department of Energy’s decades-old radiation safety standard Friday.
Wright ended the department’s use of the As Low As Reasonably Achievable — or “ALARA” — principle, which has long been a staple of nuclear regulation. ALARA is rooted in the idea that any radiation exposure carries risks, but low doses can be justified by practical considerations. Critics in the nuclear power and health fields argue that the standard is overly burdensome with no real safety benefits.
The move could lower operational costs and accelerate projects using nuclear material, but it will alter an established safety-first culture. The change in safety standards may impact DOE’s ongoing advanced nuclear reactor pilot program and high-stakes radiation cleanups, like the Hanford site in Washington state that has been dubbed the most contaminated place in the Western Hemisphere.
I looked for the DOE memo that initiated this change but wasn’t able to find it, and no one other than E&E news seems to have picked up the story yet, so it’s not clear to me how “real” this is.
Meta goes nuclear
In other nuclear power news, Meta announced a very ambitious plan to acquire 6.6 gigawatts of nuclear power. Some of this will come from keeping existing nuclear reactors online, and some of it will come from new nuclear reactors. From the Wall Street Journal ($):
Meta Platforms on Friday unveiled a series of agreements that would make it an anchor customer for new and existing nuclear power in the U.S., where it needs city-size amounts of electricity for its artificial-intelligence data centers.
The Facebook parent said it would back new reactor projects with the developers TerraPower and Oklo and has struck a deal with the power producer Vistra to purchase and expand the generation output of three existing nuclear plants in Ohio and Pennsylvania.
Financial details weren’t disclosed, but the arrangements are among the most sweeping and ambitious so far between tech companies and nuclear-power providers. Vistra and Oklo shares both rose about 15% shortly after the stock market opened. TerraPower is privately held.
Meta aims to see the first new reactors delivered as early as 2030 and 2032, a speedy target even for more-conventional power projects. Its purchase of nuclear power from Vistra starts later this year and will keep power on the grid.
The TerraPower agreement is for two reactors with a combined 690 MW of power, which could expand to up to 2.8 GW of generation capacity. The Oklo agreement is for a nuclear power campus which could have up to 1.2 GW of generation capacity.
The full Meta alchemist announcement is here.
OLED screens
The last several decades of TV technical progress have been LCD TVs getting cheaper and higher quality, but there’s a good chance LCD screens will ultimately be superseded by another display technology, OLED. Whereas LCD passes light from an LED through a layer of liquid crystal and then a color filter, OLED (organic LED) generates colored light directly with differently colored organic LEDs.
Something I note in my book is that new technologies often aren’t perfect substitutes for the older technologies they replace. Because they work in different ways, they sometimes have slightly different functionality or different performance along some axis. It seems like this is currently true with OLED: they have very bright colors and refresh rates compared to LCDs, but on computer monitors the pixel arrangements can make things like text look slightly worse. From Nuxx.net:
As shown above, the subpixels in the Dell S3225QC QD-OLED form a square with green on the top, a larger red pixel in the lower left, and smaller blue in the lower right. The Dell U3223QE, a typical LCD, has three vertical stripes making a square. The result being that high contrast edges look very different on an OLED, often with a strong off-color border — or fringe — along horizontal and vertical lines.
In the photos above, note the vertical part of the 1 which has red and green dots along its right side, and large red dots along the top of the 6 with green along the bottom. These are the strongly colored fringes. (On the LCD they appear white as the three equal size subpixels act equally.)
This meant that things that I tend to do, text or fine lines in maps or CAD-type drawing, are not right at all on the pixel pattern found in this OLED panel. Beyond the pixel pattern, I also suspect that the much crisper pixels (defined points of light) contribute to the fringing having an artifacting-like effect.
I asked Claude why OLED has these funky subpixel arrangements (compared to the three narrow rectangles that LCD uses), and it gave a few reasons:
Blue OLED Lifespan - The biggest factor is that blue OLED materials degrade significantly faster than red and green. In the QD-OLED panel the author tested, you can see a smaller blue subpixel—this is intentional. By using smaller blue subpixels (or sharing them across pixels in some designs), manufacturers can drive them harder to achieve brightness while managing their shorter lifespan. If they used equal-sized blue subpixels at the same power density, they’d burn out much faster than red and green.
Human Vision Quirks - Our eyes are naturally less sensitive to blue spatial detail. Display engineers exploit this by using fewer or smaller blue subpixels—for most content, especially video, you won’t notice. This is why these arrangements work fine for TVs and phones (where pixel density is very high) but cause visible fringing on desktop monitors with static text.
Manufacturing Constraints - OLED manufacturing (vapor deposition through fine metal masks) makes it difficult to create three perfectly aligned, equally-sized RGB stripes at high resolutions. The triangular/pentile arrangements allow for larger individual subpixels and better manufacturing yields.
Do institutional owners of single family homes drive up rents?
It’s become a common political talking point that big investors like Blackstone buying up single family homes to rent out is driving up the price of homes. This has long been a claim from folks on the left, and recently Trump announced plans to stop these sorts of purchases (though it’s not clear how he plans to do that). But plenty of folks are skeptical that institutional owners have much impact on rents, noting that institutional buyers own a very small fraction of single family homes, on the order of 2%.
On his Substack, Nicholas Decker looks at various studies of the market effects of institutional homebuyers and concludes that they actually reduce rents, not drive them up:
The current president has recently announced that he wants to ban large institutional investors from buying single-family homes, which he blames for increasing housing prices. As is often the case, it is not clear what legal authority he is basing this on, and I expect that nothing much will come of it. However, it does raise some interesting questions. Lots of people have blamed institutional investors for raising home prices, although economists have pushed back simply on the grounds that they own very little of the housing market. Are they right? Is ownership by institutional investors a contributor to the rising price of housing in America?
I believe the answer is no, not really. It appears to lower the cost of getting housing through lowering rents. The best work, when one takes a discerning look, is united on this point.