Reading List 04/5/2025
China’s sulfur emissions, Japan’s new semiconductor effort, declining sunbelt housing construction, water competition in Texas, 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 China’s sulfur emissions, Japan’s new semiconductor effort, declining sunbelt housing construction, water competition in Texas, and more. Roughly 2/3rds of the reading list is paywalled, so for full access become a paid subscriber.
A few housekeeping items:
No essay this week, but I’m working on a more involved piece about US power outages that should be out next week.
In last week’s piece about Nobel Prizes, I mentioned what seemed like an inconsistency between my analysis and a well-known paper by Ben Jones when looking at age when Nobel Prize-winning work was done. Ben Jones reached out to me and pointed out the source of this inconsistency: I was using “year prize was awarded” on the X-axis, rather than “year prize-winning work was published”. If you use the latter, a larger rise in age over time appears. I’ve updated the piece accordingly.
The Trump administration announced a sweeping new round of tariffs this week. For more on how tariffs might affect construction, see my previous piece here.
China’s sulfur emissions
Global warming is driven by an increase in carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases (such as methane) in the atmosphere as a result of wide-scale burning of fossil fuels. But not all industrial gas emissions have this greenhouse effect. Sulfur dioxide, in particular, has a cooling effect when released into the atmosphere: the particles reflect light that would otherwise reach the surface, and increase cloud formation (which reflect even more light). Pollution controls on oceangoing ships have reduced sulfur emissions and increased global warming as a result. Now it seems like pollution controls on Chinese coal plants have had a similar effect. Via New Scientist:
In the early 2000s, China had extremely poor air quality as a result of rapid industrialisation, leading to a public outcry in the run-up to the 2008 Beijing Olympics. In response, Chinese authorities fitted scrubbers to coal power plants to curb the dirtiest emissions and tightened rules governing vehicle exhausts, leading to a 75 per cent drop in sulphate emissions…
In total, China’s air pollution crackdown is responsible for 80 per cent of the increased rate in global warming seen since 2010, the team concludes, around an extra 0.05°C (0.09°F) per decade. If you look at the full amount of warming since 1850, about 0.07°C (0.13°F) can be attributed to the clean-up in Chinese aerosols, or around 5 per cent of the total, says Samset. The analysis has yet to be peer-reviewed.
Sources of air pollution
Also on the subject of air pollution, Our World in Data has a new page on the impacts and sources of various air pollutants. Worldwide, deaths from indoor pollution have fallen since the 1990s, but these have been completely offset by an increase in deaths from outdoor air pollution (this seems like it’s driven by a combination of industrialization and rising incomes in countries like China and Indonesia, resulting in less pollution from wood-burning stoves but more pollution from things like industry and coal plants).
If we look at sulfur emissions, we see that not only have emissions from energy (burning coal) and shipping declined, but there’s also been a decline in sulfur emissions from industry. Breaking it down by country, we can see a large decline in US industrial emissions starting in the 1970s, an uptick in Chinese emissions starting around 2000 as Chinese industry takes off, then a decline in Chinese industrial emissions that parallels its reduction in sulfur emissions from coal plants.
Rapidus starts production
We’ve previously discussed Rapidus, a new Japanese semiconductor manufacturing concern which “aims to escape the brutal capital costs of a modern fab using what seems to be a more Lean-inspired, one-piece continuous flow manufacturing method that minimizes inventory and cycle time.” Now it’s getting close to starting production. Via Nikkei Asia:
Japan's Rapidus says it is set to start test production of its cutting-edge 2-nanometer chips this month and deliver prototypes to customers by late July.
"All preparations for operating the pilot line have been completed as of today. We will be able to start producing [wafer] lots by the end of April," President Atsuyoshi Koike told reporters on Tuesday. He said all the equipment has been delivered and that the company is in the process of adjusting each piece of machinery.
The pilot line is located at the company's factory in Chitose on the northern island of Hokkaido. In chipmaking, a smaller nanometer size generally translates to a more advanced chip. The most advanced currently on the market are 3-nm chips.
This is potentially a big deal, as currently only TSMC, Intel, and Samsung are capable or close to manufacturing 2nm-class chips. For a little more on Rapidus and their prospects, see this SemiAnalysis piece from last October.
In other semiconductor news, Intel and TSMC have formed a new joint venture.
Japan’s 3D-printed train station
We’re still at the point in the 3D-printed buildings hype cycle that almost any real-world deployment of the technology is novel enough to get attention. In Japan, 3D printing company Serendix made news by 3D printing a (very small) train station. From the Japan Times:
The building consists of four parts, including the roof and walls, which were produced by Japanese housing maker Serendix.
The formwork was formed using mortar with a 3D printer, and reinforcing steel was put in the hollow part and concrete was filled. The building has earthquake resistance similar to that of reinforced concrete houses, JR West said.
The company undertook the construction after the end of daily train services and completed the work in about two and half hours, a considerably shorter length of time than conventional methods.
The cost for constructing the building is estimated to be half that of using reinforced concrete, the company said.
3D printing building technology is nascent enough that we’re still seeing a lot of experimentation with the basic form of it. Serendix’s method (3D printing the formwork, then pouring the pieces offsite) is pretty different from, say, Icon’s (which involves installing the printers on-site and using them to build the actual walls, rather than formwork).
It’s still not obvious to me whether 3D printed building technology will ever find its useful niche, but people are still seemingly enthusiastic about it.