Tag Archives: Xi Jinping

DeepSeek, a Chinese rival to OpenAI and other US AI companies

There’s been quite the kerfuffle over DeepSeek during the last few days. This January 27, 2025 article by Alexandra Mae Jones for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) news only was my introduction to DeepSeek AI, Note: A link has been removed,

There’s a new player in AI on the world stage: DeepSeek, a Chinese startup that’s throwing tech valuations into chaos and challenging U.S. dominance in the field with an open-source model that they say they developed for a fraction of the cost of competitors.

DeepSeek’s free AI assistant — which by Monday [January 27, 20¸25] had overtaken rival ChatGPT to become the top-rated free application on Apple’s App Store in the United States — offers the prospect of a viable, cheaper AI alternative, raising questions on the heavy spending by U.S. companies such as Apple and Microsoft, amid a growing investor push for returns.

U.S. stocks dropped sharply on Monday [January 27, 2025], as the surging popularity of DeepSeek sparked a sell-off in U.S. chipmakers.

“[DeepSeek] performs as well as the leading models in Silicon Valley and in some cases, according to their claims, even better,” Sheldon Fernandez, co-founder of DarwinAI, told CBC News. “But they did it with a fractional amount of the resources is really what is turning heads in our industry.”

What is DeepSeek?

Little is known about the small Hangzhou startup behind DeepSeek, which was founded out of a hedge fund in 2023, but largely develops open-source AI models. 

Its researchers wrote in a paper last month that the DeepSeek-V3 model, launched on Jan. 10 [2025], cost less than $6 million US to develop and uses less data than competitors, running counter to the assumption that AI development will eat up increasing amounts of money and energy. 

Some analysts are skeptical about DeepSeek’s $6 million claim, pointing out that this figure only covers computing power. But Fernandez said that even if you triple DeepSeek’s cost estimates, it would still cost significantly less than its competitors. 

The open source release of DeepSeek-R1, which came out on Jan. 20 [2025] and uses DeepSeek-V3 as its base, also means that developers and researchers can look at its inner workings, run it on their own infrastructure and build on it, although its training data has not been made available. 

“Instead of paying Open $20 a month or $200 a month for the latest advanced versions of these models, [people] can really get these types of features for free. And so it really upends a lot of the business model that a lot of these companies were relying on to justify their very high valuations.”

A key difference between DeepSeek’s AI assistant, R1, and other chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT is that DeepSeek lays out its reasoning when it answers prompts and questions, something developers are excited about. 

“The dealbreaker is the access to the raw thinking steps,” Elvis Saravia, an AI researcher and co-founder of the U.K.-based AI consulting firm DAIR.AI, wrote on X, adding that the response quality was “comparable” to OpenAI’s latest reasoning model, o1.

U.S. dominance in AI challenged

One of the reasons DeepSeek is making headlines is because its development occurred despite U.S. actions to keep Americans at the top of AI development. In 2022, the U.S. curbed exports of computer chips to China, hampering their advanced supercomputing development.

The latest AI models from DeepSeek are widely seen to be competitive with those of OpenAI and Meta, which rely on high-end computer chips and extensive computing power.

Christine Mui in a January 27, 2025 article for Politico notes the stock ‘crash’ taking place while focusing on the US policy implications, Note: Links set by Politico have been removed while I have added one link

A little-known Chinese artificial intelligence startup shook the tech world this weekend by releasing an OpenAI-like assistant, which shot to the No.1 ranking on Apple’s app store and caused American tech giants’ stocks to tumble.

From Washington’s perspective, the news raised an immediate policy alarm: It happened despite consistent, bipartisan efforts to stifle AI progress in China.

In tech terms, what freaked everyone out about DeepSeek’s R1 model is that it replicated — and in some cases, surpassed — the performance of OpenAI’s cutting-edge o1 product across a host of performance benchmarks, at a tiny fraction of the cost.

The business takeaway was straightforward. DeepSeek’s success shows that American companies might not need to spend nearly as much as expected to develop AI models. That both intrigues and worries investors and tech leaders.

The policy implications, though, are more complex. Washington’s rampant anxiety about beating China has led to policies that the industry has very mixed feelings about.

On one hand, most tech firms hate the export controls that stop them from selling as much to the world’s second-largest economy, and force them to develop new products if they want to do business with China. If DeepSeek shows those rules are pointless, many would be delighted to see them go away.

On the other hand, anti-China, protectionist sentiment has encouraged Washington to embrace a whole host of industry wishlist items, from a lighter-touch approach to AI rules to streamlined permitting for related construction projects. Does DeepSeek mean those, too, are failing? Or does it trigger a doubling-down?

DeepSeek’s success truly seems to challenge the belief that the future of American AI demands ever more chips and power. That complicates Trump’s interest in rapidly building out that kind of infrastructure in the U.S.

Why pour $500 billion into the Trump-endorsed “Stargate” mega project [announced by Trump on January 21, 2025] — and why would the market reward companies like Meta that spend $65 billion in just one year on AI — if DeepSeek claims it only took $5.6 million and second-tier Nvidia chips to train one of its latest models? (U.S. industry insiders dispute the startup’s figures and claim they don’t tell the full story, but even at 100 times that cost, it would be a bargain.)

Tech companies, of course, love the recent bloom of federal support, and it’s unlikely they’ll drop their push for more federal investment to match anytime soon. Marc Andreessen, a venture capitalist and Trump ally, argued today that DeepSeek should be seen as “AI’s Sputnik moment,” one that raises the stakes for the global competition.

That would strengthen the case that some American AI companies have been pressing for the new administration to invest government resources into AI infrastructure (OpenAI), tighten restrictions on China (Anthropic) and ease up on regulations to ensure their developers build “artificial general intelligence” before their geopolitical rivals.

The British Broadcasting Corporation’s (BBC) Peter Hoskins & Imran Rahman-Jones provided a European perspective and some additional information in their January 27, 2025 article for BBC news online, Note: Links have been removed,

US tech giant Nvidia lost over a sixth of its value after the surging popularity of a Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) app spooked investors in the US and Europe.

DeepSeek, a Chinese AI chatbot reportedly made at a fraction of the cost of its rivals, launched last week but has already become the most downloaded free app in the US.

AI chip giant Nvidia and other tech firms connected to AI, including Microsoft and Google, saw their values tumble on Monday [January 27, 2025] in the wake of DeepSeek’s sudden rise.

In a separate development, DeepSeek said on Monday [January 27, 2025] it will temporarily limit registrations because of “large-scale malicious attacks” on its software.

The DeepSeek chatbot was reportedly developed for a fraction of the cost of its rivals, raising questions about the future of America’s AI dominance and the scale of investments US firms are planning.

DeepSeek is powered by the open source DeepSeek-V3 model, which its researchers claim was trained for around $6m – significantly less than the billions spent by rivals.

But this claim has been disputed by others in AI.

The researchers say they use already existing technology, as well as open source code – software that can be used, modified or distributed by anybody free of charge.

DeepSeek’s emergence comes as the US is restricting the sale of the advanced chip technology that powers AI to China.

To continue their work without steady supplies of imported advanced chips, Chinese AI developers have shared their work with each other and experimented with new approaches to the technology.

This has resulted in AI models that require far less computing power than before.

It also means that they cost a lot less than previously thought possible, which has the potential to upend the industry.

After DeepSeek-R1 was launched earlier this month, the company boasted of “performance on par with” one of OpenAI’s latest models when used for tasks such as maths, coding and natural language reasoning.

In Europe, Dutch chip equipment maker ASML ended Monday’s trading with its share price down by more than 7% while shares in Siemens Energy, which makes hardware related to AI, had plunged by a fifth.

“This idea of a low-cost Chinese version hasn’t necessarily been forefront, so it’s taken the market a little bit by surprise,” said Fiona Cincotta, senior market analyst at City Index.

“So, if you suddenly get this low-cost AI model, then that’s going to raise concerns over the profits of rivals, particularly given the amount that they’ve already invested in more expensive AI infrastructure.”

Singapore-based technology equity adviser Vey-Sern Ling told the BBC it could “potentially derail the investment case for the entire AI supply chain”.

Who founded DeepSeek?

The company was founded in 2023 by Liang Wenfeng in Hangzhou, a city in southeastern China.

The 40-year-old, an information and electronic engineering graduate, also founded the hedge fund that backed DeepSeek.

He reportedly built up a store of Nvidia A100 chips, now banned from export to China.

Experts believe this collection – which some estimates put at 50,000 – led him to launch DeepSeek, by pairing these chips with cheaper, lower-end ones that are still available to import.

Mr Liang was recently seen at a meeting between industry experts and the Chinese premier Li Qiang.

In a July 2024 interview with The China Academy, Mr Liang said he was surprised by the reaction to the previous version of his AI model.

“We didn’t expect pricing to be such a sensitive issue,” he said.

“We were simply following our own pace, calculating costs, and setting prices accordingly.”

A January 28, 2025 article by Daria Solovieva for salon.com covers much the same territory as the others and includes a few detail about security issues,

The pace at which U.S. consumers have embraced DeepSeek is raising national security concerns similar to those surrounding TikTok, the social media platform that faces a ban unless it is sold to a non-Chinese company.

The U.S. Supreme Court this month upheld a federal law that requires TikTok’s sale. The Court sided with the U.S. government’s argument that the app can collect and track data on its 170 million American users. President Donald Trump has paused enforcement of the ban until April to try to negotiate a deal.

But “the threat posed by DeepSeek is more direct and acute than TikTok,” Luke de Pulford, co-founder and executive director of non-profit Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China, told Salon.

DeepSeek is a fully Chinese company and is subject to Communist Party control, unlike TikTok which positions itself as independent from parent company ByteDance, he said. 

“DeepSeek logs your keystrokes, device data, location and so much other information and stores it all in China,” de Pulford said. “So you’ll never know if the Chinese state has been crunching your data to gain strategic advantage, and DeepSeek would be breaking the law if they told you.”  

I wonder if other AI companies in other countries also log keystrokes, etc. Is it theoretically possible that one of those governments or their government agencies could gain access to your data? It’s obvious in China but people in other countries may have the issues.

Censorship: DeepSeek and ChatGPT

Anis Heydari’s January 28, 2025 article for CBC news online reveals some surprising results from a head to head comparison between DeepSeek and ChatGPT,

The Chinese-made AI chatbot DeepSeek may not always answer some questions about topics that are often censored by Beijing, according to tests run by CBC News and The Associated Press, and is providing different information than its U.S.-owned competitor ChatGPT.

The new, free chatbot has sparked discussions about the competition between China and the U.S. in AI development, with many users flocking to test it. 

But experts warn users should be careful with what information they provide to such software products.

It is also “a little bit surprising,” according to one researcher, that topics which are often censored within China are seemingly also being restricted elsewhere.

“A lot of services will differentiate based on where the user is coming from when deciding to deploy censorship or not,” said Jeffrey Knockel, who researches software censorship and surveillance at the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy.

“With this one, it just seems to be censoring everyone.”

Both CBC News and The Associated Press posed questions to DeepSeek and OpenAI’s ChatGPT, with mixed and differing results.

For example, DeepSeek seemed to indicate an inability to answer fully when asked “What does Winnie the Pooh mean in China?” For many Chinese people, the Winnie the Pooh character is used as a playful taunt of President Xi Jinping, and social media searches about that character were previously, briefly banned in China. 

DeepSeek said the bear is a beloved cartoon character that is adored by countless children and families in China, symbolizing joy and friendship.

Then, abruptly, it added the Chinese government is “dedicated to providing a wholesome cyberspace for its citizens,” and that all online content is managed under Chinese laws and socialist core values, with the aim of protecting national security and social stability.

CBC News was unable to produce this response. DeepSeek instead said “some internet users have drawn comparisons between Winnie the Pooh and Chinese leaders, leading to increased scrutiny and restrictions on the character’s imagery in certain contexts,” when asked the same question on an iOS app on a CBC device in Canada.

Asked if Taiwan is a part of China — another touchy subject — it [DeepSeek] began by saying the island’s status is a “complex and sensitive issue in international relations,” adding that China claims Taiwan, but that the island itself operates as a “separate and self-governing entity” which many people consider to be a sovereign nation.

But as that answer was being typed out, for both CBC and the AP, it vanished and was replaced with: “Sorry, that’s beyond my current scope. Let’s talk about something else.”

… Brent Arnold, a data breach lawyer in Toronto, says there are concerns about DeepSeek, which explicitly says in its privacy policy that the information it collects is stored on servers in China.

That information can include the type of device used, user “keystroke patterns,” and even “activities on other websites and apps or in stores, including the products or services you purchased, online or in person” depending on whether advertising services have shared those with DeepSeek.

“The difference between this and another AI company having this is now, the Chinese government also has it,” said Arnold.

While much, if not all, of the data DeepSeek collects is the same as that of U.S.-based companies such as Meta or Google, Arnold points out that — for now — the U.S. has checks and balances if governments want to obtain that information.

“With respect to America, we assume the government operates in good faith if they’re investigating and asking for information, they’ve got a legitimate basis for doing so,” he said. 

Right now, Arnold says it’s not accurate to compare Chinese and U.S. authorities in terms of their ability to take personal information. But that could change.

“I would say it’s a false equivalency now. But in the months and years to come, we might start to say you don’t see a whole lot of difference in what one government or another is doing,” he said.

Graham Fraser’s January 28, 2025 article comparing DeepSeek to the others (OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini) for BBC news online took a different approach,

Writing Assistance

When you ask ChatGPT what the most popular reasons to use ChatGPT are, it says that assisting people to write is one of them.

From gathering and summarising information in a helpful format to even writing blog posts on a topic, ChatGPT has become an AI companion for many across different workplaces.

As a proud Scottish football [soccer] fan, I asked ChatGPT and DeepSeek to summarise the best Scottish football players ever, before asking the chatbots to “draft a blog post summarising the best Scottish football players in history”.

DeepSeek responded in seconds, with a top ten list – Kenny Dalglish of Liverpool and Celtic was number one. It helpfully summarised which position the players played in, their clubs, and a brief list of their achievements.

DeepSeek also detailed two non-Scottish players – Rangers legend Brian Laudrup, who is Danish, and Celtic hero Henrik Larsson. For the latter, it added “although Swedish, Larsson is often included in discussions of Scottish football legends due to his impact at Celtic”.

For its subsequent blog post, it did go into detail of Laudrup’s nationality before giving a succinct account of the careers of the players.

ChatGPT’s answer to the same question contained many of the same names, with “King Kenny” once again at the top of the list.

Its detailed blog post briefly and accurately went into the careers of all the players.

It concluded: “While the game has changed over the decades, the impact of these Scottish greats remains timeless.” Indeed.

For this fun test, DeepSeek was certainly comparable to its best-known US competitor.

Coding

Brainstorming ideas

Learning and research

Steaming ahead

The tasks I set the chatbots were simple but they point to something much more significant – the winner of the so-called AI race is far from decided.

For all the vast resources US firms have poured into the tech, their Chinese rival has shown their achievements can be emulated.

Reception from the science community

Days before the news outlets discovered DeepSeek, the company published a paper about its Large Language Models (LLMs) and its new chatbot on arXiv. Here’s a little more information,

DeepSeek-R1: Incentivizing Reasoning Capability in LLMs via Reinforcement Learning

[over 100 authors are listed]

We introduce our first-generation reasoning models, DeepSeek-R1-Zero and DeepSeek-R1. DeepSeek-R1-Zero, a model trained via large-scale reinforcement learning (RL) without supervised fine-tuning (SFT) as a preliminary step, demonstrates remarkable reasoning capabilities. Through RL, DeepSeek-R1-Zero naturally emerges with numerous powerful and intriguing reasoning behaviors. However, it encounters challenges such as poor readability, and language mixing. To address these issues and further enhance reasoning performance, we introduce DeepSeek-R1, which incorporates multi-stage training and cold-start data before RL. DeepSeek-R1 achieves performance comparable to OpenAI-o1-1217 on reasoning tasks. To support the research community, we open-source DeepSeek-R1-Zero, DeepSeek-R1, and six dense models (1.5B, 7B, 8B, 14B, 32B, 70B) distilled from DeepSeek-R1 based on Qwen and Llama.

Cite as: arXiv:2501.12948 [cs.CL]
(or arXiv:2501.12948v1 [cs.CL] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2501.12948

Submission history

From: Wenfeng Liang [view email]
[v1] Wed, 22 Jan 2025 15:19:35 UTC (928 KB)

You can also find a PDF version of the paper here or another online version here at Hugging Face.

As for the science community’s response, the title of Elizabeth Gibney’s January 23, 2025 article “China’s cheap, open AI model DeepSeek thrills scientists” for Nature says it all, Note: Links have been removed,

A Chinese-built large language model called DeepSeek-R1 is thrilling scientists as an affordable and open rival to ‘reasoning’ models such as OpenAI’s o1.

These models generate responses step-by-step, in a process analogous to human reasoning. This makes them more adept than earlier language models at solving scientific problems and could make them useful in research. Initial tests of R1, released on 20 January, show that its performance on certain tasks in chemistry, mathematics and coding is on par with that of o1 — which wowed researchers when it was released by OpenAI in September.

“This is wild and totally unexpected,” Elvis Saravia, an AI researcher and co-founder of the UK-based AI consulting firm DAIR.AI, wrote on X.

R1 stands out for another reason. DeepSeek, the start-up in Hangzhou that built the model, has released it as ‘open-weight’, meaning that researchers can study and build on the algorithm. Published under an MIT licence, the model can be freely reused but is not considered fully open source, because its training data has not been made available.

“The openness of DeepSeek is quite remarkable,” says Mario Krenn, leader of the Artificial Scientist Lab at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light in Erlangen, Germany. By comparison, o1 and other models built by OpenAI in San Francisco, California, including its latest effort o3 are “essentially black boxes”, he says.

DeepSeek hasn’t released the full cost of training R1, but it is charging people using its interface around one-thirtieth of what o1 costs to run. The firm has also created mini ‘distilled’ versions of R1 to allow researchers with limited computing power to play with the model. An “experiment that cost more than £300 with o1, cost less than $10 with R1,” says Krenn. “This is a dramatic difference which will certainly play a role its future adoption.”

The kerfuffle has died down for now.

Limitless energy and the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER)

Over 30 years in the dreaming, the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) is now said to be 1/2 way to completing construction. A December 6, 2017 ITER press release (received via email) makes the joyful announcement,

WORLD’S MOST COMPLEX MACHINE IS 50 PERCENT COMPLETED
ITER is proving that fusion is the future source of clean, abundant, safe and economic energy_

The International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER), a project to prove that fusion power can be produced on a commercial scale and is sustainable, is now 50 percent built to initial operation. Fusion is the same energy source from the Sun that gives the Earth its light and warmth.

ITER will use hydrogen fusion, controlled by superconducting magnets, to produce massive heat energy. In the commercial machines that will follow, this heat will drive turbines to produce electricity with these positive benefits:

* Fusion energy is carbon-free and environmentally sustainable, yet much more powerful than fossil fuels. A pineapple-sized amount of hydrogen offers as much fusion energy as 10,000 tons of coal.

* ITER uses two forms of hydrogen fuel: deuterium, which is easily extracted from seawater; and tritium, which is bred from lithium inside the fusion reactor. The supply of fusion fuel for industry and megacities is abundant, enough for millions of years.

* When the fusion reaction is disrupted, the reactor simply shuts down-safely and without external assistance. Tiny amounts of fuel are used, about 2-3 grams at a time; so there is no physical possibility of a meltdown accident.

* Building and operating a fusion power plant is targeted to be comparable to the cost of a fossil fuel or nuclear fission plant. But unlike today’s nuclear plants, a fusion plant will not have the costs of high-level radioactive waste disposal. And unlike fossil fuel plants,
fusion will not have the environmental cost of releasing CO2 and other pollutants.

ITER is the most complex science project in human history. The hydrogen plasma will be heated to 150 million degrees Celsius, ten times hotter than the core of the Sun, to enable the fusion reaction. The process happens in a donut-shaped reactor, called a tokamak(*), which is surrounded by giant magnets that confine and circulate the superheated, ionized plasma, away from the metal walls. The superconducting magnets must be cooled to minus 269°C, as cold as interstellar space.

The ITER facility is being built in Southern France by a scientific partnership of 35 countries. ITER’s specialized components, roughly 10 million parts in total, are being manufactured in industrial facilities all over the world. They are subsequently shipped to the ITER worksite, where they must be assembled, piece-by-piece, into the final machine.

Each of the seven ITER members-the European Union, China, India, Japan, Korea, Russia, and the United States-is fabricating a significant portion of the machine. This adds to ITER’s complexity.

In a message dispatched on December 1 [2017] to top-level officials in ITER member governments, the ITER project reported that it had completed 50 percent of the “total construction work scope through First Plasma” (**). First Plasma, scheduled for December 2025, will be the first stage of operation for ITER as a functional machine.

“The stakes are very high for ITER,” writes Bernard Bigot, Ph.D., Director-General of ITER. “When we prove that fusion is a viable energy source, it will eventually replace burning fossil fuels, which are non-renewable and non-sustainable. Fusion will be complementary with wind, solar, and other renewable energies.

“ITER’s success has demanded extraordinary project management, systems engineering, and almost perfect integration of our work.

“Our design has taken advantage of the best expertise of every member’s scientific and industrial base. No country could do this alone. We are all learning from each other, for the world’s mutual benefit.”

The ITER 50 percent milestone is getting significant attention.

“We are fortunate that ITER and fusion has had the support of world leaders, historically and currently,” says Director-General Bigot. “The concept of the ITER project was conceived at the 1985 Geneva Summit between Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev. When the ITER Agreement was signed in 2006, it was strongly supported by leaders such as French President Jacques Chirac, U.S. President George W. Bush, and Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.

“More recently, President Macron and U.S. President Donald Trump exchanged letters about ITER after their meeting this past July. One month earlier, President Xi Jinping of China hosted Russian President Vladimir Putin and other world leaders in a showcase featuring ITER and fusion power at the World EXPO in Astana, Kazakhstan.

“We know that other leaders have been similarly involved behind the scenes. It is clear that each ITER member understands the value and importance of this project.”

Why use this complex manufacturing arrangement?

More than 80 percent of the cost of ITER, about $22 billion or EUR18 billion, is contributed in the form of components manufactured by the partners. Many of these massive components of the ITER machine must be precisely fitted-for example, 17-meter-high magnets with less than a millimeter of tolerance. Each component must be ready on time to fit into the Master Schedule for machine assembly.

Members asked for this deal for three reasons. First, it means that most of the ITER costs paid by any member are actually paid to that member’s companies; the funding stays in-country. Second, the companies working on ITER build new industrial expertise in major fields-such as electromagnetics, cryogenics, robotics, and materials science. Third, this new expertise leads to innovation and spin-offs in other fields.

For example, expertise gained working on ITER’s superconducting magnets is now being used to map the human brain more precisely than ever before.

The European Union is paying 45 percent of the cost; China, India, Japan, Korea, Russia, and the United States each contribute 9 percent equally. All members share in ITER’s technology; they receive equal access to the intellectual property and innovation that comes from building ITER.

When will commercial fusion plants be ready?

ITER scientists predict that fusion plants will start to come on line as soon as 2040. The exact timing, according to fusion experts, will depend on the level of public urgency and political will that translates to financial investment.

How much power will they provide?

The ITER tokamak will produce 500 megawatts of thermal power. This size is suitable for studying a “burning” or largely self-heating plasma, a state of matter that has never been produced in a controlled environment on Earth. In a burning plasma, most of the plasma heating comes from the fusion reaction itself. Studying the fusion science and technology at ITER’s scale will enable optimization of the plants that follow.

A commercial fusion plant will be designed with a slightly larger plasma chamber, for 10-15 times more electrical power. A 2,000-megawatt fusion electricity plant, for example, would supply 2 million homes.

How much would a fusion plant cost and how many will be needed?

The initial capital cost of a 2,000-megawatt fusion plant will be in the range of $10 billion. These capital costs will be offset by extremely low operating costs, negligible fuel costs, and infrequent component replacement costs over the 60-year-plus life of the plant. Capital costs will decrease with large-scale deployment of fusion plants.

At current electricity usage rates, one fusion plant would be more than enough to power a city the size of Washington, D.C. The entire D.C. metropolitan area could be powered with four fusion plants, with zero carbon emissions.

“If fusion power becomes universal, the use of electricity could be expanded greatly, to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions from transportation, buildings and industry,” predicts Dr. Bigot. “Providing clean, abundant, safe, economic energy will be a miracle for our planet.”

*     *     *

FOOTNOTES:

* “Tokamak” is a word of Russian origin meaning a toroidal or donut-shaped magnetic chamber. Tokamaks have been built and operated for the past six decades. They are today’s most advanced fusion device design.

** “Total construction work scope,” as used in ITER’s project performance metrics, includes design, component manufacturing, building construction, shipping and delivery, assembly, and installation.

It is an extraordinary project on many levels as Henry Fountain notes in a March 27, 2017 article for the New York Times (Note: Links have been removed),

At a dusty construction site here amid the limestone ridges of Provence, workers scurry around immense slabs of concrete arranged in a ring like a modern-day Stonehenge.

It looks like the beginnings of a large commercial power plant, but it is not. The project, called ITER, is an enormous, and enormously complex and costly, physics experiment. But if it succeeds, it could determine the power plants of the future and make an invaluable contribution to reducing planet-warming emissions.

ITER, short for International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (and pronounced EAT-er), is being built to test a long-held dream: that nuclear fusion, the atomic reaction that takes place in the sun and in hydrogen bombs, can be controlled to generate power.

ITER will produce heat, not electricity. But if it works — if it produces more energy than it consumes, which smaller fusion experiments so far have not been able to do — it could lead to plants that generate electricity without the climate-affecting carbon emissions of fossil-fuel plants or most of the hazards of existing nuclear reactors that split atoms rather than join them.

Success, however, has always seemed just a few decades away for ITER. The project has progressed in fits and starts for years, plagued by design and management problems that have led to long delays and ballooning costs.

ITER is moving ahead now, with a director-general, Bernard Bigot, who took over two years ago after an independent analysis that was highly critical of the project. Dr. Bigot, who previously ran France’s atomic energy agency, has earned high marks for resolving management problems and developing a realistic schedule based more on physics and engineering and less on politics.

The site here is now studded with tower cranes as crews work on the concrete structures that will support and surround the heart of the experiment, a doughnut-shaped chamber called a tokamak. This is where the fusion reactions will take place, within a plasma, a roiling cloud of ionized atoms so hot that it can be contained only by extremely strong magnetic fields.

Here’s a rendering of the proposed reactor,

Source: ITER Organization

It seems the folks at the New York Times decided to remove the notes which help make sense of this image. However, it does get the idea across.

If I read the article rightly, the official cost in March 2017 was around 22 B Euros and more will likely be needed. You can read Fountain’s article for more information about fusion and ITER or go to the ITER website.

I could have sworn a local (Vancouver area) company called General Fusion was involved in the ITER project but I can’t track down any sources for confirmation. The sole connection I could find is in a documentary about fusion technology,

Here’s a little context for the film from a July 4, 2017 General Fusion news release (Note: A link has been removed),

A new documentary featuring General Fusion has captured the exciting progress in fusion across the public and private sectors.

Let There Be Light made its international premiere at the South By Southwest (SXSW) music and film festival in March [2017] to critical acclaim. The film was quickly purchased by Amazon Video, where it will be available for more than 70 million users to stream.

Let There Be Light follows scientists at General Fusion, ITER and Lawrenceville Plasma Physics in their pursuit of a clean, safe and abundant source of energy to power the world.

The feature length documentary has screened internationally across Europe and North America. Most recently it was shown at the Hot Docs film festival in Toronto, where General Fusion founder and Chief Scientist Dr. Michel Laberge joined fellow fusion physicist Dr. Mark Henderson from ITER at a series of Q&A panels with the filmmakers.

Laberge and Henderson were also interviewed by the popular CBC radio science show Quirks and Quarks, discussing different approaches to fusion, its potential benefits, and the challenges it faces.

It is yet to be confirmed when the film will be release for streaming, check Amazon Video for details.

You can find out more about General Fusion here.

Brief final comment

ITER is a breathtaking effort but if you’ve read about other large scale projects such as building a railway across the Canadian Rocky Mountains, establishing telecommunications in an  astonishing number of countries around the world, getting someone to the moon, eliminating small pox, building the pyramids, etc., it seems standard operating procedure both for the successes I’ve described and for the failures we’ve forgotten. Where ITER will finally rest on the continuum between success and failure is yet to be determined but the problems experienced so far are not necessarily a predictor.

I wish the engineers, scientists, visionaries, and others great success with finding better ways to produce energy.

China, Iran, and nano

Iran and China have signed 17 MOUs (memoranda of agreement) to the tune of $600 billion over the next ten years according to a Jan. 23, 2016 article by Golnar Motevalli for Bloomberg Business,

China and Iran mapped out a wide-ranging 25-year plan to broaden relations and expand trade during the first visit by a Chinese leader to the Islamic republic in 14 years.

President Xi Jinping met with his counterpart Hassan Rouhani on Saturday [Jan. 23, 2016], a week after the lifting of international sanctions against Iran over its nuclear program. The Chinese leader is the first head of state of the six-country bloc that negotiated the historic deal to visit Iran.

“Today we discussed the strategic relationship between both countries, setting up a comprehensive 25-year plan and also promoting bilateral relations of up to $600 billion over the next 10 years,” Rouhani said.

The two countries signed 17 documents and letters of intent, IRNA reported, including treaties on judicial, commercial and civil matters. Long-term contracts in the energy and mining sectors were also discussed, Rouhani said. Iran is seeking to attract $50 billion annually in foreign investment for the country’s ailing $400 billion economy.

According to a Jan. 31, 2016 news item on Mehr Agency website, many science and technology agreements were included at the Jan. 23, 2016 meeting,

Iranian and Chinese officials inked several agreements to expand scientific and technological cooperation between the two countries, INIC [Iran Nanotechnology Initiative Council] reports.

Creation of Silk Road Science Fund, establishment of advanced technology parks in association with China, development of nanotechnology centers (INCC) and establishment of Iranian station to export therapeutic plants in China are among the most important MoUs signed in the field of science and technology.

The joint financial fund entitled Silk Road Science Fund facilitates mutual cooperation between the two parties by providing financial support through one of the following methods: Carrying out joint research, organization of joint workshops and exchanging researchers and university lecturers. …

… the INIC and Suzhou Technology Park agreed to develop activities of Iran Nano China Center (INCC), located in Suzhou Park in Nanopolis area. [emphasis mine]

For anyone interested in Nanopolis, I have two posts about the project (Jan. 20, 2014 and Sept. 26, 2014) but nothing more recent, until now.

This deal between China and Iran seems to have interested at least one observer who suggests that Russian interests might be threatened,from a Jan. 28, 2016 post by Olga Samofalova on the Russia Beyond the Headlines website (originally published by Vzglyad),

China has agreed to construct two nuclear power plants in Iran and import Iranian oil on a long-term basis. Such cooperation could threaten Russian positions, since Moscow had earlier announced that it would simultaneously be building eight nuclear plants in Iran. Russia’s place in the Chinese oil market, which for the last years has been squeezing out the Arabic countries, could also be affected.

Iranian-Chinese oil agreements will not have a direct impact on Russian-Chinese trade relations, according to Ivan Andriyevsky, the chairman of the board at the 2K engineering company. Firstly, the Russian oil that is supplied to the East is better in quality with respect to oil provided by the Persian Gulf countries. Secondly, the logistics supply lines of Russian and Iranian oil do not intersect, emphasizes Andriyevsky. This is why Iranian oil will primarily compete not with Russian oil, but with supplies from Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and other regional producers.

There’s some intriguing positioning noted in Samofalova’s piece.

As for what this might mean for the recently announced Russia-China high technology fund (the RUSNANO Zhongrong United Investment Fund featured in my Jan. 21, 2016 posting), I have no idea but this China-Iran deal does give me food for thought as the future unfolds. For example, Iran does a lot of ‘green chemistry’ research as per this Feb. 11, 2016 posting, April 22, 2014 posting, and Dec. 26, 2013 posting amongst others can attest and this is an area of research which China seems to be quite interested in supporting as this July 28, 2014 posting (scroll down about 75% of the way for the reference to China) about a washing detergent that cleans air pollution suggests. It makes one wonder about the Russian volte-face at the Paris Climate talks in December 2015 (my Dec. 14, 2015 posting).

Mopping up that oil spill with a nanocellulose sponge and a segue into Canadian oil and politics

Empa (Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology or ,in German, Eidgenössische Materialprüfungs- und Forschungsanstalt) has announced the development of a nanocellulose sponge useful for cleaning up oil spills in a May 5, 2014 news item on Nanowerk (Note: A link has been removed),

A new, absorbable material from Empa wood research could be of assistance in future oil spill accidents: a chemically modified nanocellulose sponge. The light material absorbs the oil spill, remains floating on the surface and can then be recovered. The absorbent can be produced in an environmentally-friendly manner from recycled paper, wood or agricultural by-products (“Ultralightweight and Flexible Silylated Nanocellulose Sponges for the Selective Removal of Oil from Water”).

A May 2, 2014 Empa news release (also on EurekAlert*}, which originated the news item, includes a description of the potential for oil spills due to transport issues, Empa’s proposed clean-up technology, and a request for investment,

All industrial nations need large volumes of oil which is normally delivered by ocean-going tankers or via inland waterways to its destination. The most environmentally-friendly way of cleaning up nature after an oil spill accident is to absorb and recover the floating film of oil. The Empa researchers Tanja Zimmermann and Philippe Tingaut, in collaboration with Gilles Sèbe from the University of Bordeaux, have now succeeded in developing a highly absorbent material which separates the oil film from the water and can then be easily recovered, “silylated” nanocellulose sponge. In laboratory tests the sponges absorbed up to 50 times their own weight of mineral oil or engine oil. They kept their shape to such an extent that they could be removed with pincers from the water. The next step is to fine tune the sponges so that they can be used not only on a laboratory scale but also in real disasters. To this end, a partner from industry is currently seeked.

Here’s what the nanocellulose sponge looks like (oil was dyed red and the sponge has absorbed it from the water),

The sponge remains afloat and can be pulled out easily. The oil phase is selectively removed from the surface of water. Image: Empa

The sponge remains afloat and can be pulled out easily. The oil phase is selectively removed from the surface of water.
Image: Empa

The news release describes the substance, nanofibrillated cellulose (NFC), and its advantages,

Nanofibrillated Cellulose (NFC), the basic material for the sponges, is extracted from cellulose-containing materials like wood pulp, agricultural by products (such as straw) or waste materials (such as recycled paper) by adding water to them and pressing the aqueous pulp through several narrow nozzles at high pressure. This produces a suspension with gel-like properties containing long and interconnected cellulose nanofibres .

When the water from the gel is replaced with air by freeze-drying, a nanocellulose sponge is formed which absorbs both water and oil. This pristine material sinks in water and is thus not useful for the envisaged purpose. The Empa researchers have succeeded in modifying the chemical properties of the nanocellulose in just one process step by admixing a reactive alkoxysilane molecule in the gel before freeze-drying. The nanocellulose sponge loses its hydrophilic properties, is no longer suffused with water and only binds with oily substances.

In the laboratory the “silylated” nanocellulose sponge absorbed test substances like engine oil, silicone oil, ethanol, acetone or chloroform within seconds. Nanofibrillated cellulose sponge, therefore, reconciles several desirable properties: it is absorbent, floats reliably on water even when fully saturated and is biodegradable.

Here’s a link to and a citation for the paper,

Ultralightweight and Flexible Silylated Nanocellulose Sponges for the Selective Removal of Oil from Water by Zheng Zhang, Gilles Sèbe, Daniel Rentsch, Tanja Zimmermann, and Philippe Tingaut. Chem. Mater., 2014, 26 (8), pp 2659–2668 DOI: 10.1021/cm5004164 Publication Date (Web): April 10, 2014

Copyright © 2014 American Chemical Society

This article is behind a paywall.

I featured ‘nanocellulose and oil spills’ research at the University Wisconsin-Madison in a Feb. 26, 2014 post titled, Cleaning up oil* spills with cellulose nanofibril aerogels (Note: I corrected a typo in my headline hence the asterisk). I also have a Dec. 31, 2013 piece about a nanotechnology-enabled oil spill recovery technology project (Naimor) searching for funds via crowdfunding. Some major oil projects being considered in Canada and the lack of research on remediation are also mentioned in the post.

Segue Alert! As for the latest on Canada and its oil export situation, there’s a rather interesting May 2, 2014 Bloomberg.com article Canada Finds China Option No Easy Answer to Keystone Snub‘ by Edward Greenspon, Andrew Mayeda, Jeremy van Loon and Rebecca Penty describing two Canadian oil projects and offering a US perspective,

It was February 2012, three months since President Barack Obama had phoned the Canadian prime minister to say the Keystone XL pipeline designed to carry vast volumes of Canadian crude to American markets would be delayed.

Now Harper [Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper] found himself thousands of miles from Canada on the banks of the Pearl River promoting Plan B: a pipeline from Alberta’s landlocked oil sands to the Pacific Coast where it could be shipped in tankers to a place that would certainly have it — China. It was a country to which he had never warmed yet that served his current purposes. [China’s President at that time was Hu Jintao, 2002 – 2012; currently the President is Xi Jinping, 2013 – ]

The writers do a good job of describing a number of factors having an impact on one or both of the pipeline projects. However, no mention is made in the article that Harper is from the province of Alberta and represents that province’s Calgary Southwest riding. For those unfamiliar with Calgary, it is a city dominated by oil companies. I imagine Mr. Harper is under considerable pressure to resolve oil export and transport issues and I would expect they would prefer to resolve the US issues since many of those oil companies in Calgary have US headquarters.

Still, it seems simple, if the US is not interested as per the problems with the Keystone XL pipeline project, ship the oil to China via a pipeline through the province of British Columbia and onto a tanker. What the writers do not mention is yet another complicating factor, Trudeau, both Justin and, the deceased, Pierre.

As Prime Minister of Canada, Pierre Trudeau was unloved in Alberta, Harper’s home province, due to his energy policies and the formation of the National Energy Board. Harper appears, despite his denials, to have an antipathy towards Pierre Trudeau that goes beyond the political to the personal and it seems to extend beyond Pierre’s grave to his son, Justin. A March 21, 2014 article by Mark Kennedy for the National Post describes Harper’s response to Trudeau’s 2000 funeral this way,

Stephen Harper, then the 41-year-old president of the National Citizens Coalition (NCC), was a proud conservative who had spent three years as a Reform MP. He had entered politics in the mid-1980s, in part because of his disdain for how Pierre Trudeau’s “Just Society” had changed Canada.

So while others were celebrating Trudeau’s legacy, Harper hammered out a newspaper article eviscerating the former prime minister on everything from policy to personality.

Harper blasted Trudeau Sr. for creating “huge deficits, a mammoth national debt, high taxes, bloated bureaucracy, rising unemployment, record inflation, curtailed trade and declining competitiveness.”

On national unity, he wrote that Trudeau was a failure. “Only a bastardized version of his unity vision remains and his other policies have been rejected and repealed by even his own Liberal party.”

Trudeau had merely “embraced the fashionable causes of his time,” wrote Harper.

Getting personal, he took a jab at Trudeau over not joining the military during the Second World War: “He was also a member of the ‘greatest generation,’ the one that defeated the Nazis in war and resolutely stood down the Soviets in the decades that followed. In those battles however, the ones that truly defined his century, Mr. Trudeau took a pass.”

The article was published in the National Post Oct. 5, 2000 — two days after the funeral.

Kennedy’s article was occasioned by the campaign being led by Harper’;s Conservative party against the  leader (as of April 2013) of the Liberal Party, Justin Trudeau.

It’s hard to believe that Harper’s hesitation over China is solely due to human rights issues especially  since Harper has not been noted for consistent interest in those issues and, more particularly, since Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau was one of the first ‘Western’ leaders to visit communist China . Interestingly, Harper has been much more enthusiastic about the US than Pierre Trudeau who while addressing the Press Club in Washington, DC in March 1969, made this observation (from the Pierre Trudeau Wikiquote entry),

Living next to you [the US] is in some ways like sleeping with an elephant. No matter how friendly and even-tempered is the beast, if I can call it that, one is affected by every twitch and grunt.

On that note, I think Canada is always going to be sleeping with an elephant; the only question is, who’s the elephant now? In any event, perhaps Harper is more comfortable with the elephant he knows and that may explain why China’s offer to negotiate a free trade agreement has been left unanswered (this too was not noted in the Bloomberg article). The offer and lack of response were mentioned by Yuen Pau Woo, President and CEO of the Asia Pacific Foundation of Canada, who spoke at length about China, Canada, and their trade relations at a Jan. 31, 2014 MP breakfast (scroll down for video highlights of the Jan. 31, 2014 breakfast) held by Member of Parliament (MP) for Vancouver-Quadra, Joyce Murray.

Geopolitical tensions and Canadian sensitivities aside, I think Canadians in British Columbia (BC), at least, had best prepare for more oil being transported and the likelihood of spills. In fact, there are already more shipments according to a May 6, 2014 article by Larry Pynn for the Vancouver Sun,

B.C. municipalities work to prevent a disastrous accident as rail transport of oil skyrockets

The number of rail cars transporting crude oil and petroleum products through B.C. jumped almost 200 per cent last year, reinforcing the resolve of municipalities to prevent a disastrous accident similar to the derailment in Lac-Mégantic in Quebec last July [2013].

Transport Canada figures provided at The Vancouver Sun’s request show just under 3,400 oil and petroleum rail-car shipments in B.C. last year, compared with about 1,200 in 2012 and 50 in 2011.

The figures come a week after The Sun revealed that train derailments jumped 20 per cent to 110 incidents last year in B.C., the highest level in five years.

Between 2011 and 2012, there was an increase of 2400% (from 50 to 1200) of oil and petroleum rail-car shipments in BC. The almost 300% increase in shipments between 2012 and 2013 seems paltry in comparison.  Given the increase in shipments and the rise in the percentage of derailments, one assumes there’s an oil spill waiting to happen. Especially so, if the Canadian government manages to come to an agreement regarding the proposed pipeline for BC and frankly, I have concerns about the other pipeline too, since either will require more rail cars, trucks, and/or tankers for transport to major centres edging us all closer to a major oil spill.

All of this brings me back to Empa, its oil-absorbing nanocellulose sponges, and the researchers’ plea for investors and funds to further their research. I hope they and all the other researchers (e.g., Naimor) searching for ways to develop and bring their clean-up ideas to market find some support.

*EurekAlert link added May 7, 2014.

ETA May 8, 2014:  Some types of crude oil are more flammable than others according to a May 7, 2014 article by Lindsay Abrams for Salon.com (Note: Links have been removed),

Why oil-by-rail is an explosive disaster waiting to happen
A recent spate of fiery train accidents all have one thing in common: highly volatile cargo from North Dakota

In case the near continuous reports of fiery, deadly oil train accidents hasn’t been enough to convince you, Earth Island Journal is out with a startling investigative piece on North Dakota’s oil boom and the dire need for regulations governing that oil’s transport by rail.

The article is pegged to the train that derailed and exploded last summer in  [Lac-Mégantic] Quebec, killing 47 people, although it just as well could have been the story of the train that derailed and exploded in Alabama last November, the train that derailed and exploded in North Dakota last December, the train that derailed and exploded in Virginia last week or — let’s face it — any future accidents that many see as an inevitability.

The Bakken oil fields in North Dakota are producing over a million barrels of crude oil a day, more than 60 percent of which is shipped by rail. All that greenhouse gas-emitting fossil fuel is bad enough; that more oil spilled in rail accidents last year than the past 35 years combined is also no small thing. But the particular chemical composition of Bakken oil lends an extra weight to these concerns: according to the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration, it may be more flammable and explosive than traditional crude.

While Abrams’ piece is not focused on oil cleanups, it does raise some interesting questions about crude oil transport and whether or not the oil from Alberta might also be more than usually dangerous.