I mean, isn't it enough for BEV to help fund a small sample of companies tackling some of the most challenging problems on earth? Probability of success in such an endeavour is already vanishingly small without adding further constraints. Aren't investments like these best directed at the companies with most promise, with the investors blind as to gender and race, with equality problems tackled elsewhere (e.g. in employment regulation etc.)?
We've tried being gender and race blind. But it's not helped us much, because systemic biases can't simply be overcome that way. There are good ideas in all corners, but if you want to elevate those that don't come from privileged backgrounds you have to work harder.
Wouldn't only choosing North American startups (along with having a largely white and male leadership ) be a constraint in itself? Either way, the next part states it will be more international when the companies go public over time.
Now, that's not to say they've specifically gone out and chose startups with a white male leadership but I've seen places try to explain this away by saying they "chose the best person for the job" which sounds awfully familiar to "companies with most promise".
I am genuinely curious if for-profit startups is the right setting for "fundamental breakthroughs". Could the current nuclear power technology have been invented by a startup for example?
Or more simply, 500 million tonnes.
It avoids any ambiguity -- the 5% of the planet still struggling with imperial measurements can continue to confound each other with ton, while the rest of us can confidently talk amongst ourselves about thousand-kg units (tonnes).
There is a lot of energy involved in the phase change of water. We've also had dehumidifiers for over 100 years. The takeaway from that is, dehumidifiers produce don't produce water well in arid environments.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vc7WqVMCABg
This makes me wonder if the Gates Foundation is properly utilizing scientific expertise.
This article mainly covers the MIT fusion effort. For years they struggled to keep their government funding, despite their tokamak having the most powerful magnetic field of any in the world. They finally lost that battle, and now private investors are stepping in. It doesn't appear that there was an alternative.
Government can obviously throw more money but it tends to be more conservative about what it funds. And private funding can go pretty far; it was interesting to see that TAE (Tri Alpha Energy, an aneutronic fusion effort) is up to $800 million in funding. They started work in 1999, so long-term fundamental research does seem to be achievable in a startup setting.
Even NASA in the peacetime 1950-60s which was so famously efficient and effective was largely the result of talent quickly absorbed from private industry and academia into one organization. It was a newish organization which held many of the benefits of non-gov/private organizations, as they were not yet fully affected by the heavy bureaucratic and political load which hits every government agency over time.
The type of stuff that scares away the raw talent and creatives and shifts to a system which values people who play politics and shifts power to administrative roles over the producers. https://www.jerrypournelle.com/reports/jerryp/iron.html
The more difficult question: how would a startup come to experiment with ways to build a self-sustaining fission reaction if the basic concept hadn't been demonstrated before? Something would have to be very different about history. As an improbable hand-wave, let's say that academic scientists had only ever experimented with fast-neutron fission, and didn't realize that natural uranium could sustain a chain reaction if the neutrons were moderated. We're probably deep into alt-history "World War II never happened, also the world has been surprisingly peaceful" fiction with that hand-wave.
Finally, if you really mean current nuclear power technology, e.g. one of the actual Generation III reactor designs currently operating, plus supporting infrastructure -- no, a startup could not invent all of that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_III_reactor#Generat...
You could easily blow through 100 million dollars just trying to prototype the enrichment process for the uranium that your reactor needs as fuel. Never mind actually sourcing enough natural uranium in a world where uranium has previously been a niche material like rubidium, building a uranium enrichment plant, fabricating fuel elements, forging a huge pressure vessel, developing the whole field of nuclear engineering...
But you're right. It's the company that I was most surprised to see in the list. The economics don't yet make sense to me.
I pushed Carmichael Roberts (BEV's head of investing) to explain. He said he has studied water startups for years, and he really likes the tech. But more importantly, he is very impressed by Cody's skill to sell this unit and far wide. It's already in 16 countries.
So it's using a dessicant? Heating a saturated dessicant in an enclosed environment can produce a hot, high humidity environment where dehumidification is easy. That said, it will still produce the most water someplace like San Francisco, where the humidity is high. There are places where humidity is high and the rainfall is very low.
Apparently, Zero Mass Water is using some good engineering to get something like a 4X efficiency increase for water extraction over existing commercial dessicant dehumidifiers. It's possible that removing the requirement to process large volumes of air could produce such an efficiency increase.
That is a really bad reason to invest, given the stated aims of the fund.
I just cannot think of a niche where these units would actually make sense.
It is a terrible idea to use these for disaster relief - never mind the cost, it would be better to ship in an equal weight of water.
It is wrong to use these wherever there is salt water, or polluted water - it would be far cheaper to purify whatever water there is.
And it is a bad idea to use them at remote locations, as emergency supplies or wherever reliability is important. Again, equal weight of bottled water would be much cheaper, and safer - bottled water will not break down.
I invite anybody (Mr Carmichael Roberts or company itself) to outline a scenario where this technology is preferred over reverse osmosis, or bottled water. The "Applications" page on the company web site demonstrates IMO 100% wastefully inappropriate applications. Happy to comment on any specific one of those.
Allowing access for clean water in areas where it is prohibitively more expensive (monetarily and energy wise) to get clean water. Think remote or disaster stricken areas (with appropriate conditions to use the device).
My first language is not English and I am using metric, and to me using metric ton or metric tonne removes ambiguity. I know Americans have a ton that is different from a normal ton, but have no idea about how much it is, and it is not used often enough for me to even consider it exist. I would assume 5 tonnes if it was written as 5 ton, 5 metric tons, 5 tonnes or 5 metric tonnes
I recently saw (online) a North American try to use a date format of:
yyyy-dd-mm .... I don't know why, but it was done in earnest, and it's the sort of thing that could (if it gained any kind of widespread usage) destroy much of the great work done by the ISO 8601 date/time standard.
A small thing for people who never have to deal with date formats outside their own country -- but a significant concern for people who do.
Similarly, the word tonne means a metric unit of 1000kg.
Trying to dilute the meaning by introducing phrasing such as 'metric ton' or 'metric tonne' or 'imperial tonne' (perish the thought!) is a similar regression. Journals - as the curators of common usage - have an important role to play here.
I think we can either surrender, weaken the language, give up, and defer to the confused minority, or we can stick with the sensible, previously agreed definitions and hope they catch up to us in the next lifetime or two.
how, what, why? Who would do something like that? The best is for all to stop using outdated imperial systems and forget that there is another ton than the one that is 1000 kg
I'm really never quite sure what that kind of claim actually means -- it's hosted in the US (it isn't - most of the assets come from proximal CDN for me), it's written exclusively by Americans (it isn't - they are proud of the fact their team covers 115 countries and they have 19 languages between them), it's targeted exclusively to Americans (it isn't - they've launched Quartz India and Quartz Africa), or it's read mostly by Americans (it isn't - I believe their US audience is something less than 50%), or it's owned by Americans (it isn't - Quartz is owned by a Japanese based company), or the person reading it is in North America and wants to believe that most other people are too(I can't really comment on that one).
Perhaps it's just the TLD -- but even that's a pretty flimsy claim. I've got my own .org, and I'm very much not in/owned/near/have/were American.
Anyway, there's this word tonne (which means 1000kg) and it's entirely not at odds with ton (which doesn't).
Unlike gallon, gill, mile, nautical mile, survey foot, quart, pint, fluid ounce, bushel -- which all vary depending which side of the pond you call home -- the tonne is delightfully agnostic of all that madness, and should be embraced and encouraged by sensible journals (for example Quartz) even if it means some North Americans get a bit sensitive about their archaic measurement systems.
That's a straw man argument because I did not assert that (and obviously wouldn't because it would be a stupid thing to think).
Maybe he thought your question was piercing because it implied you suspected he was racist or sexist or not concerned with gender and race bias.
Fwiw I'm from one of the excluded categories. I think they should just focus on tackling carbon reduction as they see best fit. If they achieve their mission it'll benefit every man, woman and child on earth. It's unreasonable to expect them to be omniscient. They are a small fund with a small sample of investments. Skew doesn't necessarily mean they have gender or race bias.
Elevating isn't their goal. Reducing carbon is. If we don't do that, there may be no races left to worry about equalising.
Sure, not what gp said, but agreed.
"but if you want to elevate those that don't come from privileged backgrounds"
Just some unsolicited feedback, the original race/gender quote from the article and this statement leads me to interpret that you either value equality of outcome (EG: all of these startups should have proportional distributions of gender and race in all positions) over technological advancements, or that you suspect the organization is biased to some detrimental degree.
This feedback isn't meant to insinuate that you actually believe either, just that it was my interpretation from the seemingly out of context nod to race/genders of the startup founders.
For example, if you'd have included a quote along the lines of "The startups announced by BEV so far are all above 6' tall". The statement would seem to insinuate that there's either something wrong with being 6' tall (analogous to something wrong with being white/male), or that the organization seems to unfairly favor tall people.
Also, there is no historical bias towards 6-foot people. But there was, and is, a lot of bias towards white males. For me it's fair enough to call that out.
I'm not white yet from a very privileged background. I find the way you so casually equate ethnic origin and social background to be quite shocking frankly.
I don't think that a reactor requiring enriched fuel is a good Very First Reactor design -- and the actual first reactors did not require enriched fuel -- but enrichment came up in the course of answering whether a startup could invent a modern reactor in the absence of an existing nuclear industry.
Molten salt reactors, for example, were known back in the 1950s, and appear to have a number of major cost advantages.
Or you could start a MSR with U-235 enriched from natural uranium, but that would require developing complex and expensive enrichment technology before you get your first watt of nuclear power generation.