Monthly Archives: January 2025

Coal and nuclear power, the secret to China’s cheap products

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We’ve become accustomed to buying cheap products from China: items made of glass, plastic, and metal come to the US by the ship-load, approximately $600 B worth last year, the highest from any country. Labor isn’t cheaper in China, certainly not when compared to Mexico or India, nor are the machines that make the products more advanced. What’s behind China’s ability to produce at their low prices is cheap energy—specifically, coal and nuclear-based electricity. While the US and most western countries have shut down coal plants to stop global warming, and have even shut working nuclear reactors for no obvious reason, China has aggressively expanded coal and nuclear energy production. The result? They are the largest single source of CO2, and have some of the lowest electricity prices in the world, Chinese electricity prices are about 1/4 of European, and 2/3 of U.S.

In recent years, the U.S. and Europe have increasingly relied on renewable energy sources like wind and solar. While these can work in certain areas, they require far more land than nuclear or coal, and expensive infrastructure because the power is intermittent, and generally not located close to the customer. The UK and Germany, countries with long periods of cloudy, windless conditions, have switched to solar and wind, leading to soaring electricity prices and a moribund industrial sector. Germany shut down all of its nuclear plants, 17 of them, largely to rely on electricity imported from its neighbors, and coal-fired sources that are far more polluting and unsafe than the nuclear plants they shut. The UK shut 5 nuclear reactors since 2012.

Meanwhile, China continues to build nuclear and coal plants. China is the largest user of coal power, and is planning to build 100 more coal-fired plants this year. Beyond this, China is building nuclear power rectors, including the world’s first 4th generation reactor (a pebble bed design). China has built 20 nuclear plants since 2016, and has 21 under construction. With this massive energy advantage, China produces things at low price for export: appliances, clothes, furniture, metal and plastic goods, all at a fraction of our cost. By selling us the things we used to make, China imports our jobs and exports pollution from their coal plants.

Many people instinctively understand that outsourcing production to China is harmful to both US employment and world pollution. Yet, until recently, US politicians encouraged this transfer through trade agreements like the TPP. Politicians bow to high-spending importers, and to environmental activists. It seems we prefer cheap goods to employment, and we’re OK with pollution so long as we don’t see the pollution being made. But, by outsourcing production, we’ve also outsourced control over critical industries, we’ve limited out ability to innovate, and we make ourselves dependent on China. Likely, that was part of China’s intent.

Russia has followed a similar path, keeping electricity costs mostly through low through coal, but also nuclear power, exporting their goods mostly to the EU. Before the Ukraine war, Germany in particular, relied on Russian gas, electricity, and fertilizer, products of Russian cheap power. By cutting off those energy, Germany has dealt a severe blow to its economy. Not everyone is happy.

Transfer of electricity, GWh, between European countries, 2023. Energy is most expensive in importer-nations, and GDP growth is slowest.

The incoming Trump administration has decide that, to compete with China’s manufacturing power, we need to develop our own through tariffs, and we need to increase our energy production. Tariffs can help balance the budget, and bring production back home, but without more energy, our industries will struggle to produce. I’m generally in support of this.

US production is more energy efficient than Chinese production, and thus less polluting. Besides, making things here saves on transport, provides jobs, and helps to build US technology for the future. I’m happy to see us start to build more nuclear power reactors, and restart some old plants. Solar and wind is good too, but is suited to only in some areas, windy and sunny ones, and even there, they need battery storage so that the power is available when needed.

Robert Buxbaum, January 21, 2025

The elite colleges, academic writing, and the Journal of Universal Rejection.

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What makes something elite? For elite colleges and academic journals, a large part is selectivity, the lower fraction of people who can go to your college or publish in your journal, or earn your credential, the more selective, thus the most elite. Harvard, boasts that “the best” apply, and of these, only 3% get in. Thus Harvard selects for the top 1%, or so they claim. These are not selected as the brightest, or most moral or motivated, but by a combination: they are the most Harvardian.

The top 20 most selective US colleges, 2022-23 according to Nathan Yau, FlowingData.com

Selectivity is viewed as good. That this 1% can get into Harvard makes the students elite and makes Harvard desirable. Some lower-class Ivy colleges (Columbia, for example) have been found to cheat to pretend higher selectivity; they’ve exaggerated the number of people who apply so they can inflate their rejection rate, and justify a high tuition, and presumably a high salary for their graduates. And it’s self-sustaining. Generally speaking, college professors and high-powered executives are drawn from elite institutions. Elite grads pick other elite grads as their way to get the best material, with the best education.

By this measure, selectivity, The Journal of Universal Rejection is the most elite and best. It’s the journal you should definitely get. The reject every article submitted on every subject. They are thus more elite than Harvard or Cal Tech, and more select than the quorum of US presidents, or Olympic gold winners, or living Chess champions, and they got there by just saying no. Many people send their articles, by the way, all rejected.

My lesson from this, is that selectivity is a poor metric for quality. Just because an institution or journal that is select in some one aspect does not mean that it will be select in another. Top swimmers and footballers rarely go to Harvard, so they have to pick from a lower tear of applicants for their swimming and football teams. It’s the same with the top in math or science, they apply to Cal Tech, with the rejects going to Stanford or Princeton. As for top chess players or US Navy Seals, a Harvard degree does nothing for them; few seals go to Harvard, and few Harvard students could be Seals. Each elite exists in its own bubble, and each bubble has its own rules. Thus, if you want to be hired as a professor, you have to go to the appropriate institution, though not necessarily from the top most selective.

From Nature, 2024. 20% of all academics come from just 8 schools, 40% come from the top 21.

As for journals to read or write in, an elevated reader like you should publish where you can be read, and understood, and perhaps to change things for the better, I think. Some money would be nice too, but few scientific journals offer that. Based on this, I have a hard time recommending scientific journals, or conferences. More and more, they charge the writer to publish or present, and offer minimal exposure of your ideas. They charge the readers and attendees such high fees that very few will see your work; university libraries subscribe, but often on condition that not everyone can read for free. Journal often change your writing too, sometimes for the better, but often to match the journal outlook or style, or just to suggest (demand) that you cite some connected editor. JofUR is better in a way, no charge to the author, and no editorial changes.

Typically, journals limit your ability to read or share your work, assuming they accept it, then they expect you to review for them, for free. So why do academics write for these journals? They’re considered the only legitimate way to get your findings out; worse, that’s how universities evaluate your work. University administrators are chosen with no idea of your research quality, and a requirement of number-based evaluation, so they evaluate professors by counting publications, particularly in elite (selective) journals, and based on the elite (selective) school you come from. It’s an insane metric that results in awful research and writing, and bad professors too. I’ve come to think that anyone, outside of academia, who writes in a scientific journal is a blockhead. If you have something worthwhile to say, write a blog, or maybe a book, or find a free, open access journal. In my field, hydrogen, the only free, open access journals are published in Russia and Iran.

And just for laughs, if you don’t mind the futility of universal rejection, there’s JoUR. Mail your article, with a self addressed return, or email it to j.universal.rejection@gmail.com. You’ll get a rejection notice and you’ll join an un-elite group: rejected, self effacing academics with time on their hands.

ROBERT BUXBAUM, January 16, 2025. If, for some reason, you want to get your progeny into an elite college, my niece, a Harvard grad., has a company that does just that, International College Counselors, they help with essays, testing, and references, and nudge your progeny to submit on time.

Golfball dimples on a car for improved mpg.

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The Mythbusters dimpled Taurus, and a diagram meant to show how drag is reduced. On a golf ball, at low NRE, vortex separation is moved back to 110°, the mechanism on a car is different, I suspect.

The dimples on a golf ball reduce air-drag resistance, so why don’t we put dimples on planes or cars? Perhaps because it’s ugly, or that cars are much bigger and than golf-balls, so we expect the effect of skin effects to be smaller. Finally, a Reynolds number analysis suggests that dimples on cars should increase drag, not reduce it.

In 2009, the Mythbusters decided to test the conjecture. Hosts Jamie Hyneman and Adam Savage ran careful gas usage tests on a Ford Taurus that was first covered with smooth clay. They drove the car repeatedly (5X) on a track at 65 mph (about 100 km/h), and measured “slightly over 26 mpg,” 9.047 l/100km, a respectable value. They then carved dimples into the clay to simulate the surface of a golf ball. See picture at right, and put the removed clay into the trunk so there would be no decrease in weight.

Underneath a Porche GT4, smallish dimples.

They then drove the dimpled car over the same course, five times as before at exactly 65 mph, and found the car got 14% more mpg, 29.6 mpg, or 7.946 l/100 km. See video excerpt here. They considered it their most surprising Mythbuster episode.

As it happens, dimples had been put on some production cars, even before the episode. They are just located underneath where most people don’t see them. The VW “Golf” had dimples even before the episode, and the Porsche Cayman GT4 does today, see picture above left, but most experiments find little or nothing. Car dimples are typically smaller than those used on Mythbusters, so that may be an explanation. Dimples have been found to help on soccer balls (the stitching acts as the dimples), and bicycle wheels (less advantage).

PHYSICS OF FLUIDS 18, 041702 (2006) Mechanism of drag reduction by dimples on a sphere, Jin Choi, Woo-Pyung Jeon, and Haecheon Choia.

The graph at right shows the source of confusion for cars and the great advantage for golf balls. It’s a plot of the drag coefficient for smooth and dimpled golf balls, as a function of the Reynolds Number, where NRE = Vdρ/µ. In this formula, V is velocity, d is the diameter of the car, ball or whatever, ρ is the density of the fluid, and µ is viscosity. NRE can be thought of as the ratio of the inertial to viscous forces acting on the object. It’s a way of describing the combined effects of speed and size for different objects in motion.

We see, above, that dimples reduce golf-ball drag by more than 50%, but only at speeds/ Reynolds numbers that are much lower than for normal cars, NRE between about 4×104 and 3.5×105, as are typical of golf balls during play. A typical car at 65mph will have a NRE.CAR = 3×106, suggesting that there should be no advantage for dimples, or possibility a disadvantage, that dimples should increase drag. A side note one sees, above, is that it is only the dimples on the front of the golf-ball that reduce drag: other dimples do nothing. If one were to add dimples to high-speed trains and airplanes I’d suggest them only on the front, so far I have not seen them.

I think that the Mythbusters did a good job with their experiments, and find their 14% improvement significant. So why do so few other cars see and advantage. One thought I had was to note that the Ford Taurus is a remarkably round car, providing ample space for front dimples to help, most cars today are more angular. I also note that the production cars have smaller dimples, as on the Porsche, above. Then again, the Mythbusters folks may have made some non-obvious experimental error.

Robert Buxbaum, January 4, 2024. An important side issue in this is that Google’s AI was awful, a handicap in researching this article. It lies continuously and convincingly, and did so here. I’d asked it for the year of the episode, and the AI lied, and said 2012. I asked for the type of car, the AI said an SUV, and it gave a misdescription of the tests. Lying AIs appear as villains in science fiction, e.g. HAL of 2001 A Space Odyssey, now in real life.