For the last several decades, one avenue of technological progress has towered over nearly everything else: semiconductors. Semiconductors are materials that can have their conductivity varied by...

Welcome to the Rise of Steel part II. We previously looked at the early stages of industrialization of iron and steelmaking, between roughly 1200 and 1850. To briefly recap, making steel was an...

To briefly recap, we previously found that nuclear power construction costs in the US and around the world steadily increased from the late 1960s through the 1980s. In the US, this cost increase...

The earth contains a lot of titanium - it’s the ninth most abundant element in the earth’s crust. By mass, there’s more titanium in the earth’s crust than carbon by a factor of nearly 30, and more...

A review of Angle of Attack: Harrison Storms and the Race to the Moon

Last week, US Steel announced it was being acquired by Japanese steel company Nippon Steel. The milestone gives an opportunity to look back at what once was the largest and most important company in...

Machine tools – machines that cut or form metal – are the heart of industrial civilization. Sometimes called “mother machines” (because they’re machines that make other machines), machine tools are...

Us-Mega projects Project name,Date started,Date complete,Type, Cost , Inflation-Adjusted Cost (2022 dollars) ,kiloyears of labor,% of GDP,GDP per capita year of completion,GDP year of completion...

California has received its fair share of criticism for the trajectory of its high-speed rail project. When voters first approved the $10 billion dollar bond issue for the project in 2008, it was...

A prophecy expressed frequently in engineering circles at the present day is that turbines actuated by hot gases, other than steam, will eventually come to the front as prime movers. — A Scientific...

Nuclear power currently makes up slightly less than 20% of the total electricity produced in the US, largely from plants built in the 70s and 80s. People are often enthusiastic about greater use of...

An overview of most Construction Physics posts, organized by topic.

Part One of Hot Rocks: Commercializing Next-Generation Geothermal Energy

When we left off in the 1960s, what few wind power efforts that existed had largely stalled. Commercial manufacturers that supplied wind power to rural customers disappeared as electrical grids and...

"There are no historic precedents or current parallels for the magnitude of financial exposure risked by an American airframe company" – George Ball, managing director at Lehman Brothers, 1982 "You...

Airports are a critical piece of modern infrastructure. Aviation contributes an estimated 8% to global GDP through direct and indirect effects (ie: the businesses and commerce that it enables), and...

For most of the industry’s history, electric power in the US had largely been provided by vertically integrated utility companies that handled every part of the electricity supply: generating it,...

Producing goods and services is typically subject to economies of scale - as the volume of output rises, the unit cost of each thing being produced falls. Economies of scale are common - we don’t...

Long-term, I’m optimistic about robots and automation solving construction’s stagnant cost and productivity problem. Even if nothing else works, if you can build a cheap machine capable of doing...

(note: all quotes are from Nemet’s How Solar Energy Became Cheap unless otherwise noted.) Welcome to Part II of “How did Solar Power Get Cheap?” To recap Part I, the modern solar photovoltaic (PV)...

Last week, we looked at the early history of high-speed rail in the US. Though the US attempted to build its own high-speed rail routes soon after they debuted in Japan in 1964, these efforts were...

The National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) is a piece of federal environmental legislation that was passed in 1969 towards the beginning of an “eternal September” of environmental laws, and is...