Reading List 05/30/26
A California chemical leak, weapons-grade plutonium for nuclear reactor startups, a startup that will clean your house to get robot training data, Blue Origin’s rocket explosion, and more.
House building using the “Oraaflex” modular construction system, via Wikipedia.
Welcome to the reading list, a weekly roundup of news and links related to buildings, infrastructure and industrial technology. This week we look at a California chemical leak, weapons-grade plutonium for nuclear reactor startups, a startup that will clean your house to get robot training data, Blue Origin’s rocket explosion, and more. Roughly 2/3rds of the reading list is paywalled, so for full access become a paid subscriber.
Housekeeping items:
I spoke at the Reagan National Economic Forum about energy and AI infrastructure. You can watch my panel here.
War in Iran
Iran ends 88-day long internet blackout. [The Hill] And Iran claims that the fees it’s charging to allow ships to pass aren’t tolls but “safety and environmental protection fees.” [MSN]
Housing
West coast cities such as Seattle and Portland are considering a “vacancy tax” to try and deal with the problem of empty commercial office space. Such taxes already exist in Washington DC and San Francisco. [The Urbanist]
Relatedly, developer Asher Luzzatto is trying to revitalize Denver’s downtown, which currently sits at a 40% office vacancy rate. “Luzzatto’s approach is to turn that old formula inside out, transforming desolate urban cores into welcoming places to live. He plans to convert half of the Energy Center plus two other downtown Denver office buildings into about 1,100 apartments. He’s also planning a bookstore, art gallery, children’s museum and daycare center. He acquired all four buildings for pennies on the dollar. In a matter of months, the Los Angeles native has taken control of more than 7% of Denver’s traditional downtown office space.” [WSJ]
What was it like to live in an apartment in ancient Rome? [Common Edge]
Manufacturing
In California, damage to a tank of methyl methacrylate (a substance used to make plastic) put 50,000 people under an evacuation order due to the possible risk of an explosion. Fortunately the problem was resolved without the tank exploding. [BBC] At “In the Pipeline,” chemist Derek Lowe talks about methyl methacrylate and how it could potentially cause an explosion. “There’s a key energetic aspect to these polymerizations: they’re thermodynamically favorable, and these bond formations give off a bit of heat as they occur. This heats up the solution as a whole, and that in turn speeds up the reactions all by itself! Which means even more heat as even more molecules polymerize. . .and now you see why storage of large quantities of these monomer compounds is not for the unwary. You have to keep them away from anything that can start a free-radical chain reaction, and that means light and heat for starters, but also not letting them sit in contact with many metals and alloys, etc.” [Science]
In other “damaged chemical tank” news, one person was killed at a chemical tank explosion at a paper mill in Washington state. [USA Today]
Nvidia plans to spend on the order of $150 billion in Taiwan each year. [Reuters]
Chinese tech firm Huawei claims a major chip design breakthrough. “Huawei said Monday at a tech conference in Shanghai that by 2031, its high-end chips would have transistor density equivalent to 1.4-nanometer processes, which is considered the industry’s cutting edge.” [MSNBC] And Chinese battery manufacturer Calb is building a battery factory in Portugal that will produce on the order of 4% of the country’s GDP. [X]
A report on the state of US missile manufacturing. “America’s missile production hinges on a small number of ammonium perchlorate facilities, meaning a single plant accident can bring output to a standstill; a concentration risk that has no real equivalent elsewhere in the defense industrial base. AP production relies on narrow workforce pipelines for specialized energetics handling, layered environmental and explosives permitting, and purpose-built manufacturing equipment. Each of these inputs is hard to duplicate quickly, even with dedicated funding, which is why decades of rhetoric about supply chain expansion have produced so few second sources in practice.” [Contrary]
Inside Ukraine’s efforts to manufacture thousands of ground-based drones. [TWZ]