Reading List 11/01/2025
A new semiconductor lithography startup, how to make batteries more like bombs, AI and real estate listings, a monastery being built in Wyoming, 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 a new semiconductor lithography startup, how to make batteries more like bombs, AI and real estate listings, a monastery being built in Wyoming, and more. Roughly 2/3rds of the reading list is paywalled, so for full access become a paid subscriber.
A few housekeeping items this week:
The Amazon listing for Origins of Efficiency seems to finally be fixed; as of this writing its listing 4-5 day shipping time.
I was on Odd Lots talking about construction, housing, and the book.
ADL Ventures, an energy technology and infrastructure incubator, is hiring for a role for someone who can do economic modeling for industrialized construction.
British shipbuilding reading list
The decline of British shipbuilding has been extensively studied, and there doesn’t seem to be all that much disagreement as to the causes; any book you pick up will probably tell a similar story. Here’s the ones that I found most useful:
British Shipbuilding and the State Since 1918, by Lewis Johnman and Hugh Murphy, 2002 — This book is a very thorough look at the involvement of the UK government in the shipbuilding industry since the end of WWI, but it’s also an extremely good broader survey of the British shipbuilding industry more broadly and the various challenges it faced over the course of the 20th century. If you pick one book on the recent history of British shipbuilding, make it this one.
The Economics of Shipbuilding in the United Kingdom by JR Parkinson, 1960 — This has some good information on British shipbuilding from the late 19th through the middle of the 20th century, and is a good “snapshot” of what the industry looked like right as things really started to turn.
Economic Decline in Britain: the Shipbuilding Industry by Edward Lorenz, 1991 — This is a good articulation of the basic “rational actor” thesis of British shipbuilding decline (which is implicit in a lot of these other discussions).
Sunrise in the East, Sunset in the West, by Dan McWiggings, 2013 — a PhD thesis on the rise of Korean shipbuilding and the decline of British shipbuilding, written by someone who (I believe) formerly worked in shipbuilding, this had some useful information/perspective.
Substrate raises $100 million
The arc of technological progress can be hard to predict. In the 1980s and 1990s X-ray lithography, a semiconductor fabrication technology which uses X-rays to etch microscopic patterns onto silicon wafers was considered the most promising next step in lithography technology. IBM alone had invested over a billion dollars in the technology. Instead, partly due to chronic difficulties with X-ray lithography, the industry coalesced around Extreme Ultraviolet Lithography technology.
Now a new US semiconductor startup, Substrate, is hoping to use X-ray lithography to achieve similar performance to EUV at a fraction of the price. Via the Wall Street Journal:
Substrate’s ambitions don’t end with breaking ASML’s lithography monopoly. Rather than supply the machines to chip manufacturers, known as foundries or fabs, the company says it will establish a network of its own fabs equipped with its lithography machines in time to begin producing chips at scale by 2028.
The company has hired more than 50 employees from IBM, TSMC, Google, Applied Materials and national laboratories.
Proud, who was born and raised in the U.K., was the first recipient of the Thiel Fellowship, awarded to aspiring entrepreneurs who choose to skip higher education and start a company. He renounced his British passport and became an American citizen in 2019, and became fixated on thwarting China’s advancements in semiconductors.
Advanced fabs today start at $20 billion, and sometimes cost twice that. Proud said Substrate, by using its own, cheaper tools, will be able to build fabs for a price in the “single digit billions.”
The company’s website shares a few details of their process:
Our results shown here can be compared with the current industry’s “high numerical aperture” (High NA) EUV lithography and are equivalent in resolution to the 2 nm semiconductor node, with capabilities to push well beyond.
To accomplish this, we had to invent a new technology capable of producing the critical patterns required for today’s advanced silicon, which was lower cost, less complex, more capable, and faster to build.
Random vias with 30 nm center-to-center pitch with superb pattern quality and critical dimension uniformity.
The team at Substrate has designed a new type of vertically integrated foundry that harnesses particle accelerators to produce the world’s brightest beams, enabling a new method of advanced X-ray lithography. Our accelerators create and power beams that generate light billions of times brighter than the sun, directly into our lithography tools, each using a completely new optical and high-speed mechanical system to produce the smallest of features needed for advanced semiconductor chips.
Semianalysis has more, noting that if true these claims are “extraordinary”. And here’s a skeptical take.
Making batteries more like bombs
Historically a major limitation of batteries for things like electric vehicles is energy density. Batteries store much less energy per unit mass or per unit volume compared to something like gasoline, a fact that has historically hampered the performance of electric cars. Battery energy density has improved over time, but it’s still far less than the energy density of gasoline.
Hard tech incubator Orca Sciences has an interesting (but highly technical, I could only roughly follow it) post about what it would take to make extremely energy dense batteries:
Batteries are a lot like explosives. Like explosives, batteries contain both reducing chemicals and oxidizing chemicals bundled tightly together, ready to react with one another. Like explosives, we engineer our batteries to pack these chemicals together as tightly as possible to speed reaction rates. Like explosives, we like our batteries as powerful as possible…
But the way we put batteries together is a bit like how we made gunpowder in the 1700s. Even though all of the salient reactions and transport phenomena occur on the angstrom-scale, we build batteries in mechanically separated layers—100μm anode, 30μm separator, 100μm cathode etc. Tiny as that seems, that’s as enormous in chemical terms as grains of charcoal and saltpeter in a musket. Even 20 microns leaves tens of thousands of separator molecules for each ion to crawl through before it can cough up an electron into your favorite circuit. So slow!
So here’s the obvious question: what if we could make batteries more like TNT, and assemble them at the molecular scale, with anode and cathode only angstroms apart?
$80 billion nuclear deal
The US has only built two operating nuclear power reactors (Vogtle units 3 and 4 in Georgia) in the past 25 years (a third, Watts Bar reactor 2, was completed in 2015 but started construction in 1972). Nuclear enthusiasts are perennially hoping for a nuclear renaissance in the US, and while there’s been some promising signs (such as restarting some shuttered nuclear plants), we haven’t seen any moves towards large-scale reactor construction.
But that might be changing. This week a deal was announced between the US government and Westinghouse to construct eight of their advanced AP1000 nuclear reactors. Via the Financial Times ($):
The US government and the owners of Westinghouse have struck an $80bn deal to build a fleet of nuclear reactors, using funding from a trade agreement with Japan.
Brookfield Asset Management and Cameco, Westinghouse’s owners, said they had formed a new partnership to provide the reactor technology for the plants, which would help realise Donald Trump’s goal to quadruple US nuclear capacity by 2050.
The investment announced on Tuesday would fund about eight Westinghouse AP1000 power plants, according to Brookfield, or a mix of larger facilities and small modular reactors.
The involvement of Japan is a further sign of Trump’s efforts to use ongoing trade negotiations to secure critical supplies of power and mining assers.
Washington’s spending commitment is being funded by a $550bn deal Trump has agreed with Tokyo and endorsed at his first meeting with new Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi on Tuesday.
Another part of this $550 billion Japanese investment is apparently going to shipbuilding. Via the Maritime Executive:
The Yomiuri Shimbun reports the new agreement calls for the formation of a Japan-U.S. shipbuilding working group that will focus on investments that can be made to make the shipbuilders more efficient and competitive. They call for considering standardizing ship design and parts, and possibly having Japan design parts that could be produced in the United States. By standardizing designs, they propose that the countries could repair each other’s ships.