Tag: pollution

Location based road tolls

 

This is a pre proposal for a location based road toll system. It’s modified from one that I wrote in Finnish for a local discussion on the subject. It’s “pre” in a that it doesn’t even try to be complete, rather privacy and reliability against cheating are considered. Privacy from both the perspective of real time location as well as from the perspective of a location archive. Location is defined with the extra attribute that it is collected in a distributed manner, the car (or users device) collects it based for example on GPS or other satellite locationing system, or for example by a LIDAR.

See also Jakke’s take on the subject.

That governments are inventive in creating new things to tax is taken as a given. It is not my intention to consider what would be the correct toll level of the toll at any time, location, vehicle type, weather etc. The reason to have a toll system that covers all public roads and has a road use cost that changes depending on conditions is efficiency. Limited resources are available for example to road building and maintenance. By setting the price of road use higher at rush hour it is possible to control the number of people that decide to use that part of the road at that time. In short the system creates a market for a good. The reason to have a location based system is that it has very fine granularity, for example it is able to set the price of using a road near a school higher and thus able to give an incentive to select an alternate route.

Premises:

a) The system doesn’t need to be perfect. Someone might be able to cheat and not get caught. This is true with most rules, there is no need to catch every shoplifter or tax evader to keep the correspondent problem at bay. To give some context: in March 2012 a the newspaper Helsingin Sanomat reported that in  Finland the police is able to solve about 42 % of all property, violence and sex related crimes.

b) The ability of (local) governments to manage software and technology projects is limited (this may be true universally, but I know its true in Finland). Thus it would be beneficial to use private resources to develop the system.

c) monitoring of compliance should be done in the traditional way, i.e. spot checks. This may be automated, but the number of checks should be limited.

d) For those that have difficulties to use new technology or oppose it on principle an alternate way of paying is offered. For example a ticket that is valid for a day or a month. For a large majority this should be more expensive that using the location based system. When buying such a ticket some routes may be restricted. These limitations are needed to make most people use the location based system. Otherwise the market would not function properly.

e) A fairly reliable wireless network and cheap devices to use it are available.

Technical details are not considered in detail as they are considered to be fairly easily solvable. Some changes to laws may be required depending on the jurisdiction and at least in Finland there will be an outcry if a private company collects payments resembling taxes.

Figure 1 shows a simplified flow of system operation. Vertical dashed lines partition the operations done by the three different stake holders. The boxes marked “SW” show that the driver gets the software from the company, for example through an app store.

The third party (i.e. “company”) is brought to this picture mainly because I believe that it can develop and operate the system more efficiently. Secondly it is much easier to take ones business elsewhere than to do the same with a government. Thirdly losing consumer trust is a bigger thing to a company than losing trust of citizens is for a government.

At “Start” either the car or the driver starts the system. Several different kinds of automatic ways of doing this are possible for example Bluetooth connection with car can trigger the system. The information that recording has started is transmitted to the company. Location may be sent with the information but this might not be mandatory as only information that the system is recording could be enough at this point. At set intervals (location or time) the location is recorded. It is possible to encrypt and transmit this information at longer intervals, this information could be used by the company to check that the final trip info (sent later) is correct. At “End” the location information is sent to the company.

The tolls are defined by the (local)government or the owner of the road. The “Price” may be dependent on time, weather, location, congestion or other parameters. It is possible to have continuously varying prices, but at least human (in contrast to robot) drivers may prefer to have the prices before the journey.

A HASH is calculated to make it possible to check that the information has not changed after it leaves the drivers device. “Encrypt and save” the data to the users device for further use. Unencrypted information is transmitted to the company so that it can check that the trip appears to be a valid one.

If it could be assumed that the software or hardware has not been tampered with, the information could be transmitted to the company in encrypted form and the possibility of a privacy violation at the orange “Check” could be avoided. I don’t believe that this is possible without either using expensive custom hardware or severely restricting the users ability to use the device. Another way could be to transmit only encrypted information but trust the checking mechanisms introduced below. This however could lead to more frequent point checks which would be an other kind of privacy violation.

When the trip information is received by the company, it is checked for consistency. For example are the location points sensible or are some located in the middle of the Pacific ocean or are some points missing? If there are some problems the user is notified and the information about the problems is archived. For those who have a lot of problems actions can be suggested, to update devices etc. If everything is fine, the information is encrypted and the unencrypted data is destroyed. Encryption is done by using the public key of the driver. This means that no accessible database of driver location is formed. The data can only be accessed if the driver gives his private key.

Billing is done as indicated in the figure, at the same time the encrypted info is copied to the governments archive.

For those who value their privacy more than others it is possible to sell prepaid codes that are connected to an account on a company database. The driver could use for example a Tor network to update the location information to the company database. This way the company would at no point know for certain who is travelling. Of course if the trips start at home or work it would be fairly easy to match this information to at least a group of people.

Figure1_roadtolls
Figure 1. Simplified system operation.

In addition to tampering with the soft- or hardware it is possible to trick the system by simply not initiating a journey when necessary. To be able to rely on something else than trustworthiness of the users Figure 2 shows a procedure to check that the user is doing his end of the deal.

The inspector asks the driver to stop. The driver then gives the inspector a code from his recording device. This code is given to the company which returns with information on the device’s status, either a trip is ongoing or not. Depending on how strict the privacy is the company could also give information on how long the trip has been going on or what has been the distance travelled. It could for example tell if the distance is over one kilo meter. By following the driver for a short while this could rule out cases where the trip is started only after the request to stop has been given.

It is likely possible to automate the checking procedure for example by reading the licence plate using machine vision and checking from the company if a car with these plates is on a trip.

Checking of driver
Figure 1. Checking of driver

If the company income is tied to the amount the driver pays incentive for the company to cheat is diminished. This is true especially if the invoice makes a trip through the government bureaucracy as this makes it possible to check that the sums are statistically in the ballpark. Figure 3 shows how the company can be inspected without violating the privacy of the driver. The idea is to pay (random) drivers for revealing their whereabouts. When voluntariness and an auction is used, no one needs to yield unless the compensation is adequate.

The encrypted information saved in the users device is compared to those the company has given the government. If this is done by the driver the government never knows where the driver has been. Because these inspections would hit a company fairly often it can be assumed that enough honest drivers are reached to be able to determine if a company is following the rules.

As the road prices need to be public it is possible for the driver to make certain, perhaps by using free software, that the company is charging the correct price.

Figure 3. Checking the company.
Figure 3. Checking the company.

Nuclear propulsion

I’ve been designing a Mars mission with a nuclear rocket. Admittedly this might be a bit much for a one man operation. It grew out of desire to render a NERVA II rocket engine with blender. Although I’m not known to be detail oriented the things that I try to model should look at least a little bit like they might look if they were actually made some day, so I used “existing” hardware to estimate weight of a spaceship and then plug the numbers in to the rocket equation. After some tuning I came up with a two stage space tug that has about 1.5 Gg of mass at low earth orbit. This contraption should be able to transfer five BA 330 modules and 200 Mg of cargo to Mars orbit.

The propulsion unit for my design. It needs six.
A propulsion unit for my design, it needs six.

Before anyone gives harsh critique on the numbers: this is a very notional design: I’d be happy if the numbers are within an order of magnitude of the correct ones. And did I mention that much of the stuff is sort of vaporware or less real.

Close up of the NERVA II. To show the scale, the big cube is 10^3 m3, the green speck is 0.1^3 m3. The Hydrogen tank is almost 47 m long.
Close up of the NERVA II. To show the scale, the big cube is 10^3 m3, the green speck is 0.1^3 m3. The Hydrogen tank is almost 47 m long.

I like physics, I like rockets and almost anything space related, so for me this type of thinking by doing is fun. What is more surprising is that some quite serious people have thought that this could actually be done. Nuclear rocket engines have been proposed and tested ( “direct” nuclear jet engines too).

“Steady progress was made in engine efficiency and controllability, and in lowering the release of radioactivity” [from here]. Just to make it clear these beasts were no sissy nuclear electrics, the idea was to spray a hot reactor core with hydrogen. Several designs were tested in the atmosphere. The word that surely comes to mind when thinking about this sort of engine test is erosion. One would expect that active parts of the core would be spewed out of the hot end even in normal operation.

There is always the possibility of the not so unlikely turbopump failure. While my limited knowledge suggests that because there is no need for an oxidizer it is a bit easier to design one, the eventual pump failure could still lead to a loss of coolant. Not to worry, they tested (KIWI TNT) what happens if you stop the coolant. Boom.

While my design sketch is a space tug, i.e. it would never be used in the atmosphere thus limiting the release of radioactive substances to the biosphere, these engines were also suggested as upper stages for chemical rockets to boost performance. Then there is of course Project Orion, which from the current viewpoint boggles the mind.

No point, just some perspective.

Talvivaara 5: What is going on?

 

We have a firm policy of never publishing any “agitprop” material. I will circumvent the rule by posting a propaganda piece I helped write, but providing skeptical commentary. In effect, I will argue against myself.

PDF version of the official piece: What is causing the environmental damage in Talvivaara.  More blog posts on Talvivaara (Finnish only): Talvivaara. 

WHAT IS CAUSING THE ENVIRONMENTAL DAMAGE IN TALVIVAARA?

By the Kainuu District of the Finnish Association for Nature Conservation (Suomen Luonnonsuojeluliitto). 

The environmental problems of the Talvivaara mine are difficult to summarize briefly. They are systemic, and made worse by the actions of the authorities (in this case the Kainuu ELY Center, in charge of monitoring the mine). The Talvivaara mine has caused excessive environmental damage; the ELY Center has repeatedly approved this damage; whenever challenged in court, its decisions have been found to be invalid. However, these court rulings come almost a year after the fact, and are irrelevant because Talvivaara has done so much more ELY-approved damage in the meantime. The system has become a monster.

Commentary: Obviously “monster” is agitprop. But other than that, the later analysis shows that the basic mechanism seems to be true. The system is definitely in a self-perpetuating feedback loop, which is difficult to stop.

In practice Talvivaara has never achieved a “normal” mode of operation. All of the wastewater treatment has happened in violation of the original environmental permit, issued in 2007. This has created chronic problems, which has led to a loop of repeated and uncontrollable acute problems. The ELY Center is actively collaborating in the damage by refusing to sanction the mine in any meaningful way.

Commentary: “Active collaboration” is agitprop. But certainly the actions of the ELY Center are not making the situation easier.

The mine started with the premise of a closed water circuit, in which a water-purification plant ensures that no wastewater is emitted into the environment. Such a plant  was already a requirement in the environmental permit in 2007. As of 2013, Talvivaara has no plant, and is emitting 1.3 million cubic meters of wastewater per year.  Instead of purification, the wastewater is neutralized by adding lime to the acidic water, and precipitating some of the toxic metals in a gypsum pond. This creates sulphate salts. The salt water is then diverted into ponds and rivers. The sulphates have already permanently contaminated several small lakes near the mine, and are proceeding downstream toward larger bodies of water.

Commentary: The basic mechanism is true. No water purification is being done, although the permit requires a plant to be built at some point.  Neutralization of an acid with lime produces salts, which contaminate fresh water. Rises in sulphate levels have been measured in lakes tens of kilometers away. However, there is legitimate dispute how significant that rise is, the amount of damage that has actually happened, and how permanent it is. We simply do not know yet.

The Vaasa Administrative Court of Finland made two significant rulings against the Kainuu ELY Center last week. In early 2012, the ELY Center decided that despite the environmental damage the mine was chronically causing, there was no need to shut it down. The Administrative Court has now ruled that the damage was significant, and extreme measures should have been considered.

Commentary: This may be reading too much into the decision. Technically speaking, the Court simply decided that the ELY Center decision was invalid, and has to be reconsidered. The amount of damage as such was not assessed by the Court; they ruled that the damage assessment made by the ELY Center was insufficient. 

In June 2012, Talvivaara invoked a “state of emergency” under Article 62 of the Environmental Protection Act, which allows permits to be temporarily bypassed in case of a natural catastrophe. Talvivaara then diverted its wastewater past the gypsum pond, bypassing a crucial step in the cleaning process. The ELY Center approved the diversion. The Administrative Court has now ruled that in fact there was no state of emergency.

Commentary: These facts are not in dispute. The criteria for invoking Article 62 are quite stringent, and they were not fulfilled. 

In both cases, the Administrative Court invalidated the decisions of the ELY Center. Unfortunately, this shows a fundamental breakdown in the system: coming almost a year after the fact, these rulings are essentially irrelevant. The damage that the ELY Center helped to create can no longer be undone, since so much new damage has been done in the meantime.

Commentary: Calling the rulings “irrelevant” is extreme, but little can be done to correct the damage. The situation is analyzed (in Finnish) in Talvivaara 4. The diagram below shows some features, even though it is in Finnish. Orange lines refer to technical problems; red lines refer to emergency solutions; red lines crossed over refer to emergency solutions that have been declared illegal. This is the simplest possible diagram that captures even some of the key problems. 

Picture9

There have been four further states of emergency (August 2012, November 2012, January 2013, and February 2013).  Most seriously, there was a massive leak in the gypsum pond in November, which has made the pond unusable (it also leaked in 2008 and 2010). It appears that Talvivaara illegally diverted one million cubic meters of highly polluted and acidic metal raffinate into the gypsum pond, contributing to the leak. The authorities are investigating this.

Commentary: These facts are not in dispute. The breakdown of the gypsum pond (Kipsi-allas) in the diagram above in particular is a serious issue, since it makes it very difficult to achieve normal operations.

It has also emerged that Talvivaara has no water-management plan, which was a key requirement in the 2007 environmental permit. Talvivaara has blamed rainy weather in 2012 for its problems; however, rainfall was never considered in the design and risk analysis of the mine. There also seem to be fundamental problems in the bioleaching process, according to an external report.

Commentary: Not in dispute. The problems in the water and risk management are described for example in the February 15 independent commission report  (Talvivaara-selvitys, Finnish only).  The external report was done by SRK Consulting. 

Company management has stated that the situation is almost under control. However, the same message has been repeated since the mine began operations, and Talvivaara has a track record of unreliable statements about its water management.

Commentary: Agitprop. The positive messages from the company are certainly true. Whether they are unreliable depends on whom one chooses to trust. However, the Talvivaara-selvitys did note that the problems with the water management are serious.

Even more worryingly, the mine now plans to almost triple its operations, and to begin extracting uranium from the ore. (The presence of uranium has been known since the 1960’s, but was conveniently forgotten by Talvivaara and the authorities in order to avoid public backlash when the mine was started).  Based on the past track record of the company, this sounds like a recipe for disaster.

Commentary: Agitprop, in particular “conveniently forgotten”. In general, whenever an environmental organization mentions the word “uranium”, one can expect a torrent of antinuclear propaganda. However, the propaganda value is not pursued deeply here, and it is true that uranium was never mentioned when the mine was first built.  The last question is phrased in a rhetorical way, but is a valid question. If a company seems completely unable to control its operations, is it a good idea to allow it to triple those operations? 

Conclusions of the commentary: Most of the facts mentioned here are not in dispute. Some of the readings of the court decisions may be biased. Claiming that the ELY Center is actively collaborating in causing the environmental damage is certainly propagandistic. However, the actions of the ELY Center certainly are not helping. It is debatable whether the situation in Talvivaara is quite as apocalyptic as suggested here, but it is certainly not under control. Overall, the rhetorical tone clearly marks this as a propaganda text, but I would argue that there are no serious distortions, and that the interpretation is more or less supported by the facts.  

Acknowledgments: Many people contributed to the text, including Johan Heino, Janne Kumpulainen, and Pertti Sundqvist.

 

Sulfur directive and IPR

To be populistic: we pay now, but our industry has a payback time in 2020 and gets the money back from Greek merchant shipping.

[Local subjects for a change. Heavier IPR material moved to www.project-trogolodyte.org. // Paikallisia asioita vaihteeksi. Raskaampi IPR-materiaali siirretty ylläolevaan linkkiin.] 

[Finnish version: here. All the links in the article point to Finnish-language sources, but similar material can be found easily.] 

The sulfur directive has been  accepted in the EU parliament. By 2015, ships in the Baltic sea need to drop their sulfur emissions from the current 1% to 0.1%.
Finland is strongly polarized on this. Environmentalists (of whom I am one) against industry. The environmentalists “won” this round, but this is not the place for anyone to gloat, at least not arrogantly. On the contrary, both sides have valid concerns. The directive is positive for environmental and health reasons; it is negative for the Finnish economy and employment statistics.

How positive or negative? One should be skeptical of everyone and everything since it is such a complicated issue, but approximately:

  • The directive saves lives. Whether or not one believes the exact figures of the environmentalists (50,000 extra deaths a year), it is clear that sulfur and particle emissions do have large-scale health effects.
  • Finland will suffer economically. Whether or not one believes the exact figures given by industry, (600 millions EUR per year or 12,000 jobs), common sense and a look at the map says that Finland will suffer more than most countries. We are effectively an island.
  • This is not just an EU decision. The International Maritime Organization IMO has itself approved the limits already in 2008. The EU directive adds very little. If this directive really came as a surprise, someone has been sleeping soundly.
  • In 2015, the limit only affects the so-called SECA-areas, meaning the Baltic Sea, North Sea, English channel and the coasts of Canada and the USA. In the rest of the world, the limit will not be applied until 2020 at the earliest, possibly as late as 2025. It is easy to find this unfair: the directive hurts those countries the most which have already done a fairly good job reducing emissions in general.

The Finnish government has proposed to give 30 million EUR in subsidies to quickly attach scrubbers to ships, but this most likely cannot happen due to the anti-subsidy laws  of the EU.

If Finland had been prepared for the directive, there could have been a win-win scenario. That 30 million, rather than being used (or not used) for subsidies, could have been used to kick-start a major R&D program to create ultra-cheap ultra-flexible plug-and-play scrubbers that could fit into even the shabbiest ships of the world.

There are fewer limits on R&D subsidies, and the 30 million really would not be a major dent in the national budget.

In fact, the 5-10 years’ extension for the rest of the world is precisely what could have given us an opportunity. In 2020 (or 2025), everyone will be just as “surprised” as Finland is now, for example the Mediterranean countries. In the current economic situation, the Mediterranean countries really cannot afford large public R&D investments, even if they are awake.

The possibility would arise from using the IPR system correctly. To those who don’t know much about IPR, and to those who do but are skeptics (myself included), the word “patent” sounds like a boogieman. But this is exactly the kind of situation which the IPR system is meant for: to enable large investments now, in the hopes of recouping those investments much later via licensing. Patents are valid for 20 years. In these R&D programs, it would make sense to patent everything that moves.

To be populistic: we pay now, but our industry has a payback time in 2020 and gets the money back from Greek merchant shipping.

Ugly and heartless? Yes. IPR is ugly.

Unethical? No. This is what the IPR system is meant for, whether one likes it or not. This is not unfair against small inventors (a common complaint), because no one can build large-scale scrubbers in his garage. This is large machinery, requiring large companies.

The proposal may sound vaguely nauseating to everyone. But this is what I would do. It may be too late for the sulfur directive, which is regrettable. But when the next environmental “surprise” arrives, it would make sense to be prepared.

 

Pollution week 5: Summary

“So we will continue to plod on. In fact, we will be expanding this activity to a new website soon.After all, what’s the alternative? Maybe if we all close our eyes and ears, all the bad things will go away?”

Written by: Jakke Mäkelä, Timo Tokkonen, and Niko Porjo.

The postings this week have, we think, given an overview of what a project like Troglodyte could hope to achieve against entities like Intellectual Ventures. Not much, but even a tiny bit helps. Especially posting four might give ideas on countermeasures against the worst of the trolls.

The possibilities are quite limited; on the other hand, being prepared is infinitely better than being unprepared.

Continue reading Pollution week 5: Summary

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