Reading List 12/28/24
Construction Physics year end stats, Chinese drug manufacturing, jet fighter-launched satellites, the stubbornness of coal, 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 Construction Physics year end stats, Chinese drug manufacturing, jet fighter-launched satellites, the stubbornness of coal, and more! Around 2/3rds of each reading list is paywalled, so for full access become a paid subscriber.
No essay this week, but I’m working on a longer piece about the origins of TSMC that should be out next week.
Construction Physics stats for 2024
This year on Construction Physics I wrote 37 essays (not including reading lists) totaling 151,677 words, or an average of around 4100 words per post. Total (free) subscribers grew from 29,097 to around 49,900.
The five most popular posts of the year were:
My top five books of 2024
All this writing requires a lot of reading; in 2024 I bought 125 books on amazon, and added 1062 items to my Zotero library. Most of the stuff I read is of the “has a particular piece of information I need” flavor rather than being the sort of thing that’s interesting to just sit down and read, but I read a few great books during the year. My top five (in no particular order):
The Sporty Game by John Newhouse, 1982: This is the classic book on the commercial aircraft industry and the brutal competition between the various players as they bet their companies on new aircraft development. Still a good and useful look at how the industry operates, though the players have since changed (at the time the US industry consisted of Boeing, Lockheed and Mcdonnell-Douglas, Airbus was still the young upstart, deregulation had only just begun, etc.) It’s a great and gripping read, though books by and for aircraft enthusiasts inevitably end up somewhat bogged down by technical minutiae that most of us don’t care about. Newhouse avoids this to some extent, but not completely.
The Abandoned Ocean: A History of United States Maritime Policy by Andrew Gibson and Arthur Donovan, 2000: This is a great history of the entire history of US merchant shipping, from the early years of the republic up through the 1990s. It's not a book about shipbuilding per se; as per the title, it's more about government policy around shipping and shipbuilding. But because US shipbuilding has been so uncompetitive for so long, shipbuilding issues end up being a major portion of the book. Gibson and Donovan do a great job balancing between giving detailed, specific information and higher-level synthesis and takeaways (something I'm always trying to do better in my own work). This is the book I'd recommend for anyone wanting to better understand why US shipbuilding is such a mess.
High-Speed Dreams by Erik Conway, 2005: This is a fantastic history of the US’s SST efforts, written by a historian at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab, covering the period between 1945 and 1999. Most books I found on the subject of supersonic transport had trouble striking the right balance between the technical aspects of the aircraft itself, the process of developing the new technology, and the organizational aspects of marshaling support for the project and fending off opposition. But of course, these all influence each other; the performance requirements dictate the technological development required, and the resulting cost and aircraft economics dictate how much support the project receives, which in turn influences what sort of technology the program has time and funding to develop. Focusing on, say, the performance specifications of the aircraft (as many aviation books love to do) while ignoring the organizational aspects leaves a huge hole in your understanding. But High-Speed Dreams nails this balance, giving a (not too) detailed look at the technical evolution of supersonic flight, and how SST supporters tried (and ultimately failed) to corral support and funding for SST projects amidst various sources of opposition and technical hurdles. If you’re interested in reading a book on American SST efforts, or understanding more deeply the organizational and political problems of major technology development programs, this is a great choice.
Concorde: New Shape in the Sky by Kenneth Owen, 1982: There are many, many books written about the Concorde, but this was by far the best book I read on the actual development of the aircraft. It’s intended as an accessible guide to understanding the Concorde project and its technology, and covers how the project came together and the various technical and political challenges that needed to be solved along the way to achieving commercial service. Like High-Speed Dreams, this book nails the balance between the technical, organizational and economic aspects of development, and how they influenced each other. Not only is it a great look at what it took to build the Concorde, but it’s one of the best books I’ve read on what technology development actually looks like in practice.
When the machine stopped: A cautionary tale from industrial America by Max Holland, 1989: This book chronicles the rise and fall of a small west coast machine tool manufacturer, Burgmaster, known for its turret drills. It goes very deep on the struggles and successes of Burgmaster and the changing landscape of the machine tool industry: the rise of Japanese manufacturers, the evolving technology and the difficulty of staying ahead with new products, Burgmaster’s acquisition and subsequent mismanagement by the large conglomerate Houdaille, and its ultimate destruction in the 1980s. This is a great book for getting a more visceral understanding of the decline of US manufacturing.
New dams
The largest power station in the world is the Three Gorges Dam in China, which has an installed capacity of 22.5 GW (where 1 GW is roughly the output of a large nuclear reactor.) Now China is planning on building an even larger hydroelectric dam. From Reuters:
China has approved the construction of what will be the world's largest hydropower dam, kicking off an ambitious project on the eastern rim of the Tibetan plateau that could affect millions downstream in India and Bangladesh.
The dam, which will be located in the lower reaches of the Yarlung Zangbo River, could produce 300 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity annually, according to an estimate provided by the Power Construction Corp of China in 2020.
That would more than triple the 88.2 billion kWh designed capacity of the Three Gorges Dam, currently the world's largest, in central China.
The project will play a major role in meeting China's carbon peaking and carbon neutrality goals, stimulate related industries such as engineering, and create jobs in Tibet, the official Xinhua news agency reported on Wednesday.
A section of the Yarlung Zangbo falls a dramatic 2,000 metres (6,561 feet) within a short span of 50 km (31 miles), offering huge hydropower potential as well as unique engineering challenges.
The outlay for building the dam, including engineering costs, is also expected to eclipse the Three Gorges dam, which cost 254.2 billion yuan($34.83 billion). This included the resettling of the 1.4 million people it displaced and was more than four times the initial estimate of 57 billion yuan.
Related, the World Bank is now funding dam projects again. From Yale E360:
Throughout the last half of the 20th century, the bank was the world’s leading supporter of big hydro. But over the last two decades, it followed a zigzag pattern as dam supporters and critics inside the institution took turns determining hydro policy. During the last 10 years, the critics — disturbed by big dams’ huge social and environmental costs and their long construction timelines — seemed to dominate, and the bank supported only one new big hydro project.
But earlier this week the bank’s board of directors approved a scheme to make the bank the lead financier in a $6.3 billion project to finish construction of the Rogun Dam in Tajikistan. The frequently stalled project, launched in 1976, is now about 30 percent complete. If fully built, it would become both the world’s tallest dam, at 1,100 feet, and with its total price tag of $11 billion, one of the world’s most expensive…
The bank’s role in these projects marks a sharp shift in its approach towards hydroelectric dams. “Rogun and Inga are the biggest dams in the world, on a scale we haven’t seen in decades,” said Josh Klemm, co-executive director of International Rivers, an Oakland, California-based river protection NGO. From 2014 to this year, the bank supported only one new major hydropower project, Nachtigal in Cameroon. Yet between this week and mid-2025, the bank’s board of directors is likely to approve financing for five major dams, including Rogun and Inga 3.
Car manufacturing valley of death
The “valley of death” is the period early in a startup's life when it is spending large amounts of money to spin up operations but doesn’t yet have much revenue. This graph of free cash flow for EV manufacturers from alojoh on twitter shows how brutal this valley of death is for car manufacturing.
Chinese drug manufacturing
Cars aren’t the only industry where Chinese manufacturers have become strikingly competitive over the past several years. The same thing seems to be happening in pharmaceutical manufacturing. From Alex Telford, a biotech startup founder:
…the big question in the auto industry right now is whether the West will cease to be competitive. In biotech, too, some are beginning to ask that question.
Westerners are used to thinking of China as a manufacturing powerhouse, a country that makes the parts for cars and iPhones and the latest viral children’s toy. We’re also used to thinking of China as a place that can copy well; good at making generic drugs and cheap knock-offs of fad kitchen gadgets. I don’t think many in the West have yet fully internalized a mental model of China as a source of genuine innovation.
It was not too long ago that China’s main contribution to the pharma industry was the raw chemical material, the active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs), that went into finished drug products discovered, designed, and developed by Western (and Japanese) innovators. However, if you’ve been paying attention, you’ll have noticed the steady rise in Chinese companies as a source of genuinely new drugs (i.e. drug discovery). Chinese companies are now responsible for about a quarter of new trial starts — more than Europe. It is in early-stage (phase I), oncology, and cell and gene therapy where Chinese companies are particularly active.
