Why not encourage Iran and other states to develop thorium-based nuclear power?

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It is a crying shame that we (the rest of the world) did not think to encourage Iran and other states to develop thorium-based nuclear power many years ago. The thorium fuel cycle provides nuclear-powered steam generation, but is largely absent the use of fissile isotopes in the cycle which may be used for nuclear proliferation.  Thorium-232 is more abundant that uranium-(235 + 238) isotopes and does not require isotopic separation as uranium does.

The great exploration boom in progress with rare earth elements would facilitate thorium supply. Thorium and uranium are commonly found in rare earth ores and, to the dismay of extractive metallurgists since the Manhattan Project, these elements tend follow along in rare earth extraction process. The isolation of thorium was developed long ago.  Point is, since so many rare earth element extraction process streams are either in operation or are pending, now is the time to accumulate thorium.

At present however, thorium is a troublesome and undesired radioactive metal whose isolation and disposal can be quite problematic. The best process schemes partition thorium away from the value stream as early in the process as possible and channel it into the raffinate stream for treatment and disposal in the evaporation pond.

The specific activity of natural thorium is 2.2 x 10^-7 curies per gram (an alpha emitter). The specific activity of natural uranium is 7.1 x 10^-7 curies per gram.  Alpha emitters pose special hazards in their handling. Dusts are a serious problem and workers must be protected especially from inhalation or ingestion. While alpha’s are not difficult to shield from, their low penetration through ordinary materials or even air makes them a bit more challenging to detect and quantitate relative to beta’s and gamma’s. In spite of the mild radioactivity of thorium, managing the occupational health of workers is known technology in practice in the nuclear industry.

Regrettably, most of the world’s nuclear power infrastructure is geared to uranium and plutonium streams. Thorium, the red-headed stepchild of the actinides, is thoughtlessly discharged to the evaporation ponds or to the rad waste repository- wherever that is- to accumulate fruitlessly. If we’re digging the stuff up anyway, why not put it to use? It is a shame and a waste to squander it.

Corporate person Pratt & Whitney provides attack helicopter technology to China

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Lets give a big Bronx cheer for Pratt & Whitney, a subsidiary of United Technologies (UTC), for illegally providing turbine engine technology to China.  And, while we’re at it, lets give a toot for Hamilton Standard for providing the control software.

According to a recent article in The Atlantic, the Canadian division of Pratt & Whitney provided engines for the production of the Chinese Z10 attack helicopter. It is worth the read.

The Chinese helicopter that benefited from Pratt’s engines and related computer software, now in production, comes outfitted with 30 mm cannons, anti-tank guided missiles, air-to-air missiles and unguided rockets. “This case is a clear example of how the illegal export of sensitive technology reduces the advantages our military currently possesses,” Immigration and Customs Enforcement Director John Morton said in a statement released on June 28.  The Atlantic, July 6, 2012.

According to the Federal Contractor Misconduct Database of the top 100 offending corporations, UTC ranked number seven.

OK. I’ll state the obvious. This is a very eggregious crime.  If an individual did this, the outcome for such a person might be considerably more punitive. But an amoral corporate being like UTS and it’s wayward subsidiary Pratt & Whitney, the consequences are more abstract. A $75 million hit to the bank account for aiding a nation who’s military influence in the eastern Pacific rim is increasingly in conflict with US interests.  Not a trivial consequence, but nonetheless a consequence that does not match the transfer of sensitive technology to a country with values antithetical to US policy.

CERN to make announcement Wednesday, July 4, 1012

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According to the CERN website, a webcast on LHC experiments is planned for, Wednesday, July 4, 2012. Apparently a new particle has been detected. Could it be the big chalupa? The Higgs boson?

CERN has previously announced resonance data at the expected energy but cautioned that the correlation by the requisite number of sigma’s was not in hand. In the US, a similar announcement was issued the other day from Tevatron data in Illinois. Same problem- not enough sigma’s. Hmmm. I wonder what CERN is going to say tomorrow wink wink nod nod?

On a side note, according to Quantum Diaries, researchers at CERN run Monte Carlo collision simulations for comparison purposes to the actual data stream. If events occur that are not anticipated by the simulations, then there is cause to examine the particular events. Interesting approach to sorting the data.

USPTO to open new regional offices

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Attention inventors!  I just received this from a friend who is a patent examiner. The USPTO is expanding to 4 new locations around the country.

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USPTO to Open Four Regional Patent Offices The Commerce Department and USPTO announced plans today to open regional USPTO offices in or around Dallas, Denver, and Silicon Valley, in addition to the already-announced first satellite office to open July 13 in Detroit. The four offices will function as hubs of innovation and creativity, helping protect and foster American innovation in the global marketplace. They will also help the agency attract talented IP experts throughout the country who will work closely with entrepreneurs to process patent applications, reduce the backlog of unexamined patents, and speed up the overall process, allowing businesses to move their innovation to market more quickly and to create new jobs.

Selection of the four sites was based upon a comprehensive analysis of criteria including geographical diversity, regional economic impact, ability to recruit and retain employees, and the ability to engage the intellectual property community. The Leahy-Smith America Invents Act of 2011 (AIA), signed into law by President Obama in September, requires the USPTO to establish regional satellite locations as part of a larger effort to modernize the U.S. patent system over the next three years.

Since the passage of the AIA, the USPTO and the Department of Commerce have been committed to an open, robust, and fair site selection process based on extensive public input. In addition to reviewing more than 600 public comments in response to a public Federal Register Notice, USPTO officials met with hundreds of state and local officials, congressional delegations, and policy leaders. The selection team developed a model to evaluate more than 50 Metropolitan Statistical Areas based on the previously stated criteria to assess operational cost and feasibility, ability to improve patent quality, and ability to employ U.S. veterans.

The USPTO will develop concepts of operations and best practices for the three newly-announced locations based on lessons learned from the Elijah J. McCoy Detroit Office over the coming months and years. While the Detroit office will employ approximately 120 individuals in its first year of operations, including patent examiners and administrative law judges, the USPTO is working to develop specific hiring plans for the other sites.

The agency will also seek to identify and maximize the unique regional strengths of all four offices to further reduce the backlog of patent applications and appeals.

“By expanding our operation outside of the Washington metropolitan area for the first time in our agency’s 200-plus year history, we are taking unprecedented steps to recruit a diverse range of talented technical experts, creating new opportunities across the American workforce,” said USPTO Director David Kappos. “These efforts, in conjunction with our ongoing implementation of the America Invents Act, are improving the effectiveness of our IP system, and breathing new life into the innovation ecosystem.”

The Chemical Entrepreneur, Part 3.

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In previous posts I have written about aspects of starting and running a chemical business.  I do not pretend to cover all views on this matter. It has been my experience that entrepreneurs and inventors are a thick-headed lot who often see the world through colored and distorted optics. To such folk I can only offer this- Cash flow is life. Have something to sell right away if not sooner.

For everyone else, a chemical business can take many forms. Choose your business model carefully. Here are some examples of general business models-

  1. Distribution or catalog model.  Buy in bulk or semi-bulk and repackage for resale. This ranges from specialties to commodities. Selling samples means that you can sell under the R&D exemption under TSCA. You may have noticed that R&D quantities from supply houses are almost always labeled with “R&D Only.” This means that the sample is exempt from TSCA regulation.
  2. Formulation.  Buy raw materials and blend to produce your products. Sell your own brand or under a customer’s brand. This is often the world of commodities.
  3. Tolling business.  A toller is a processor for hire. A toller takes a customer’s raw materials and processes them in a specified manner to produce a product. In tolling, the operator agrees to produce to a specification and yield agreed to by contract.
  4. Commodity scale production.  Process raw materials to produce a product that competes with other manufacturers of the product. Commodity buying decisions are made on the basis of price and contractual terms. it is commonly a high volume, low unit margin operation. Products pricing typically very sensitive to raw material costs.
  5. Pharmaceutical manufacture. Highly specialized and capital intensive.  Specialized skill sets are required.  Cash needed for long dry spells during development. Expect to turn over control to VC’s sooner than later. This is the realm of VC/Esq/MD/PhD/MBA’s- an especially loathsome combination of buggering pencil-necks.  I would rather roll naked in broken glass wetted down with Tabasco than try starting a pharmaceutical business, but that is just my own bias.
  6. Specialty/custom synthesis.  Manufacture custom chemicals for customers who will use them in their own process. This is usually done under a secrecy agreement on a spot basis or under contract.  Specialty products may be from the public domain or may be the result of proprietary processing. They are “specialty” because they are low demand, require specialized skills, have particular specs, or are below the radar screen of other manufacturers. This kind of production may take you into the EPA TSCA regulatory realm, depending on the end use of the substances. TSCA space is a murky space where you’ll likely need a full-time regulatory staff of specialists. This kind of regulatory compliance can dramatically extend lead times for delivery.
  7. Hybrid catalog/specialty/custom.  Aldrich Chemical started in this category. They were a catalog operation that was highly opportunistic. The hoods and kilo labs that filled their catalog collection could also be used to do custom or specialty manufacture.  Alfred Bader’s great strength as an entrepreneur was his total commitment to getting the customer what they wanted.  Bader’s method was to find out what chemists wanted and make it available to them.  The secret to the catalog business is variety. Grow the collection and raise prices 5 % every year.
  8. Analytical services.  Analysis work doing water, soil, fly ash, mineral, elemental, concrete, feed, fuel samples etc.  You need to have approved methods and certifications to sign off on many analyses.  In this business, you must keep the instruments going night and day to the greatest extent possible. The good news is that advanced degrees are not often needed and fresh college grads often flock to this kind of work. Turnover may be high, though. Not everyone takes to analytical work.

I have had numerous opportunities to speak with chemists, often chemistry professors or university tech transfer folks, about their interest in commercializing an invention or exploiting an opportunity. Many of the ideas have related to reagents and catalysts. Professor X has developed a catalyst that performs some transformation in a unique manner and the prof is naturally interested in the commercial possibilities.  Prof X has filed a patent application through the university tech transfer office.

Let’s say that Prof X has a new late transition metal complex that, say, performs some transformation. The professor has a good patent attorney so the composition of matter of the catalyst is claimed bearing mono and bidentate pnictogen ligands with C1-C30 alkyl, aryl, alkylaryl, arylalkyl, fluorinated alkyl, fluorinated aryl, alkylsiloxanes, arylsiloxanes, and on and on. Multi-dimensional Markush ligand space is claimed as well as a whole universe of chiral variants. Prof X has also claimed methods of catalyst preparation as well.

Here is what Prof X controls. Nothing.  If Prof X is the inventor but not the assignee, then Prof X has turned over control of the invention to the University as is often the case.  Maybe the good Prof gets royalties personally or for the Prof’s research.  This depends entirely on what Prof X had negotiated with the university.  Some universities make a lot of royalty money from the patent portfolio. A great many do not.

Starting a business based on a transformation using patented compositions or processes can be a tough sell.  For established products, you have to convince a customer why they should take their lined-out process and change it. Even worse, and this is a common deal killer, your customer’s customer may require lengthy and expensive validation.  And, you need a good answer to the question the end user will ask- What kind of price can we expect as a result of this change?  Better to supply product or technology during the development stage when changes are not so problematic.

The other big negative to selling proprietary reagents or processes is negotiating the terms and pricing.  From the customers perspective, adopting your composition or process means that smack in the middle of their process train they have to manage a licensed technology with extra paper work and auditing.  This is a big problem with catalysts. Many of the newer catalysts you see in the Aldrich or Strem catalogs are proprietary and must be used under a license agreement.  Nothing stirs the creative juices like the desire to avoid paying royalties by finding white space in a patent or inventing a new process.

Having been involved in such license negotiations, I can say that you need to have a lawyer looking over your shoulder while you consider the terms and conditions. These agreements often entail upfront fees and a sliding scale of pricing based on usage.  Some IP owners want a piece of your gross product sales resulting from the use of their technology. An annual audit may be expected as well.  It’s like having raccoons in your picnic basket.

Instead of trying to convince the world that your reagent, catalyst, or additive is worth adopting, why not find a product that your technology enables?  When you manufacture and ship a product, you can earn profits on the mass produced.  You can use your technology to produce a portfolio of fine or custom products.  Better yet, why not just find out what customers want. You have 110 or more years of public domain chemistry available to you in Chemical Abstracts there for the taking. Maybe you can even sell some of your composition to customers for their development work.

If you have no interest or capital for starting a commodity production facility, then you have to consider the other end of the spectrum- low volume, high margin specialty or fine chemicals. But how do you find products?  Well, that is a problem. For the rank outsider, getting a clue as to what the market is about can be difficult. Commerce specifics in specialties or custom chemicals are usually confidential information.

An important consideration for the entrepreneur is to focus on your strengths and knowledge of the markets in your area of specialty.  Low volume, high value products require smaller equipment and accordingly, smaller entry costs.  I would encourage someone who wants to start up a synthesis business to avoid the one-act pony scenario.  There is strength in having a diverse collection of product offerings. Multiple products and multiple customers bring greater stability.  Your synthesis business should be a 3-ring circus of multiple simultaneous performances to a diverse audience.

In regard to products to start with, phone or visit purchasing managers to make an introduction and talk about your capabilities. Walk a trade show like Informex or ChemSpec to get an idea of what the market is doing. Many purchasing managers at chemical companies have a list of troublesome compounds they are trying to source. Keep your processes as close to earth, air, fire, and water as possible and try to keep your vessels full, even if the margins are low.  It is important to have some good history with customers.

There is more to life than pharmaceuticals. It is possible to have a productive life entirely outside of medicinal chemistry. Consider CVD or organic semiconductor chemicals.  This field is famous for stringent purity specs. But often the users do their own polishing.

Read patents from 20 years ago to see what technology is coming into the public domain. Scan recent patents in the USPTO’s Patent Gazette to see what potential customers are doing. Often, reactions in the specification are not claimed in the patent. Who knows, the procedure may actually work.

Search the USPTO for key words relating to chemistry you want to do. You’ll find assignees who represent potential customers. Maybe they’re looking for someone to take over preparation of materials related to their technology.  Just because a chemical company patents a composition or process doesn’t mean that they want to practice it. They just want to control it.   Look around.

Related Posts-

Rethinking Start-Up Opportunities

Ways to be an Entrepreneur

US Chemical Business Innovation

Start-Up Failures

A Few Hints on Starting a Chemical Business

Andy Grove on Scale-Up

The Chemical Entrepreneur, Part 1.

The Chemical Entrepreneur, Part 2.

The Chemical Entrepreneur, Part 2.5

Gluten harvest underway

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The annual gluten harvest is underway in northern Colorado.  Winter wheat planted last autumn has pushed through the soil, grown to produce a head of grains on every stalk, and finally, transitioned from a sea of lush green grass to the now dessicated amber waves of grain. Giant harvesting machines are cutting the short-statured hybrid crop and somehow rattling it into chaff and grain.

Now that we are avoiding gluten in our household, I view the wheat harvest a little differently. It is somebody else’s harvest.  It’s odd way to look at it I suppose.

Smokey Mountains of Colorado

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Last evening the layers of mountain valleys to the west and north were filled with smoke from the High Park fire west of Ft Collins, Colorado. The valleys full of haze reminded me of the Smokey Mountains of Kentucky in the evening.

The fire is 25 miles as the crow flies from my house. The prevailing winds have been highly variable, but the recent front that passed through caused the smoke to blow towards my home town over the weekend. The air is usually clear enough to see Pikes Peak 100 miles to the south. But of late the visibility and air quality has been quite poor.

Colorado has seen waves of growth over the years, much of it along the I-25 corridor and the major east/west routes through the mountains. A common aspiration here is to have a home in the mountains. The housing boom of the last 20 years lead to the spread of MacMansions perched on mountain tops and slopes. Buyers with enough wealth or credit were able to pay the high expense of building a dream home in a remote location and pay for drilling a well in hard rock and running a long powerline up to the site.

What we are seeing is the negative side of having a home in the forest- crown fires that burst through the forest at speeds that surprise everyone. The thermal emissivity of a stand of flaming pine trees is quite high, first dessicating adjoining trees then heating the pine resins to the ignition point either by radiant energy, flame impingement, or by the spread of embers.

A major worry for the High Park fire in particular is the effect on rivers and municipal drinking water reservoirs by rain and snow runoff from the burned ground.  A smokey flavor is desirable for a barbeque sauce but not for tapwater.

This fire seems to be headed for the number one forest fire in Colorado history. Time will tell.

Microscopic Printing on Aldrich Chemical Labels

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OK. I’m going to have to be the bad guy and take Aldrich (SAFC) to task on their labeling. I recently received a 100 mL bottle of 10.0 M BuLi in hexanes.  As I looked around for the concentration, I found it written in tiny print away from the name and part number which were written in larger print.  I have placed a ruler next to the label in the photo below to show the size of the print. It is the same size as the date on a penny.

Labels do not “just happen”. Someone has to design a label. This involves arranging content on a limited space while meeting internal and external requirments for safety statements and other content.  Labels do not fall from the sky in great sticky sheafs. Someone prints them. And that someone assigns font sizes and space for the information. So, someone has caused the font size to be tiny irrespective of the print content. I have numerous bottles with microscopic printing and vast expanses of white space. This smells of automation.

I’ll wager that there is an automated label generator that takes product label data and prints it onto the label irrespective of the actual need for microscopic font size. I can envisage a giant warehouse with automated shelf pickers whizzing about pulling bottles off the milti-tiered stacks and placing them into plastic tubs which course their way to shipping. Elsewhere in this voluminous interior is a widget that prints the labels and sticks them onto the bottle after they are filled.  Somewhere a human is pushing a broom.

C’mon Aldrich! Make your labels more legible. Good gravy. What would Bader say? I’m sure your accounting office has no trouble reading the print on the checks that arrive to pay for these products.  Consider that you’ve been put on notice.

Fine print on Aldrich reagent bottle. Molarity is printed in 1.0 mm font size.

ChemSpider Magic with LASSO

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Of late I have been concerned with R&D information and various homebrew means of storing it and retrieving it. Institutionalizing R&D results into easily accessed knowledge can roll into a real hairball if you’re not careful. More on that another time.

My adventures with CHETAH 9.0 have caused me to look deeply into SMILES strings and what utility might be found there. This lead me to rediscover ChemSpider and the many services it provides for free to the user.

Consider the following: if you generate a SMILES structure of acetylsalicylic acid, say, from Chemdraw, O=C(O)C1=C(OC(C)=O)C=CC=C1, and use this character string as a search term in ChemSpider, it will take you to the entry for aspirin. What you get is a treasure trove of information on this substance. Go to ChemSpider, cut and paste the above SMILES string into the search box, and let her rip. I’m not your Momma. Just try it.

The breadth of references is encyclopedic.  But the truly amazing part is found when you scroll to the end of the page. There is a drop down window for SimBioSys LASSO. ChemSpider is working to provide LASSO data on its large database of compounds.  LASSO generates a structure and grinds it through a neural net processor module and produces a score between zero and one. The closer the score is to 1.00, the greater the surface conformity or compatibility of the ligand to a target receptor site.  As you would expect, there is a high score associated with aspirin and the COX-1 receptor. From what I can tell, the software is self-learning in some fashion.

The uses are many. Substances can be screened for drug-like attributes within the 40 receptor types provided.  I would like to hear from someone who might have something to say about the use of LASSO for the estimation of possible toxic effects of substances that have not been biologically tested. I fully realize the hazards of this, but perhaps LASSO scores might help flag particular substances for closer examination by testing.

Adrift in Cheminformatics Space. CHETAH 9.0 Fails with Some ChemSketch SMILES Strings.

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The ASTM software Chemical Thermodynamic and Energy Release version 9.0, CHETAH 9.0, has many useful features for calculating thermodynamic values of substances.  My interest is in the (gas phase) calculation of ΔHf, limiting oxygen concentration, lower flammability level, Cp, entropy, ΔG, maximum heat of decomposition, net plosive density, ΔHc, and minimum ignition energy. The package claims to have the largest known database of Bensen group values at 965 entries.

I would have supplied links but the WordPress Editor is on the fritz. One more bloody software “issue”. – ‘th Gaussling

I recently upgraded from CHETAH 8.0 to 9.0 because 8.0 is incompatible with Windows 7.  These upgrades are a kilobuck a pop so they can be a budgetary surprise. After I upgraded I noted that 9.0 is not compatible with Windows 7 either!! Luckily I have a couple of lab computers that are still XP systems and therefore compatible with 9.0.  The folks at the University of South Alabama write and support CHETAH.

I understand from private communication that CHETAH 10.0 is in the works in anticipation of the release of Windows 8. Oh joy. I hope that some effort will be put into the user interface and general robustness. My question is this- what about those of us who will be using Windows 7 for the next few years? Will rev 10.0 be compatible? Will it have click and drag features or more of a DOS accent like the current rev?

One of the features that is nice about CHETAH is that it accepts SMILES strings as data input.  It parses the string into known Benson groups and flags unknown groups.  Previously I had been entering smiles strings from ChemDraw 7.0, an ancient but still useful version. Lately I have been evaluating ChemSketch freeware.  And lucky for me, I found another hole to stumble into.

SMILES is not inflexible in its syntax, apparently.  ChemDraw will convert a structure to a SMILES string that is different in its sequence from the identical structure drawn by ChemSketch.  I have found that CHETAH 9.0 will consistently accept SMILEs string entries from ChemDraw, but with only some ChemSketch SMILES strings.

Consider the following SMILES strings of the same structure-  5-Bromo-7-tert-butoxy-3-methyl-3H-isobenzofuran-1-one. The nomenclature is from Chemdraw. I do not use this compound- I dreamed it up as an example.

ChemDraw 7.0–  O=C2OC(C)C1=CC(Br)=CC(OC(C)(C)C)=C12

ChemSketch 12–  CC(C)(C)Oc1cc(Br)cc2c1C(=O)OC2C

The ChemDraw SMILES string is accepted by CHETAH 9.0 and parsed into Benson groups, but when you attempt to process the data it gives a “Run-time error 9” warning and then closes the program. From what I can tell, CHETAH 9.0 will only accept 9 Benson groups because when you clip off functional groups, it will accept the string for the next step. However, it still shuts down and indicates another error saying “subscript out of range”. I don’t know why this happens and the handbook does bnot seem to list errors. The programmer put the error routines in the program, but I guess was too busy to tell anyone what they mean.

The ChemSketch SMILES string above is not accepted at all.

I cannot justify switching to ChemSketch for several reasons and this is one of them.  The ChemSketch editor is generally balky compared to the smooth operation of ChemDraw. However, I must say that ChemSketch is very feature rich and has gotten much better. If I wasn’t already committed to ChemDraw (and Chem3D) I’d strongly consider it.

CHETAH seems to have limitations on the number of Benson groups it will accept for a molecule. It seems to require a particular edition of SMILES syntax. And, the user interface is is balky and antiquated.  I’ll try to uninstall CHETAH and reinstall it. That said, it still seems … brittle.

From what I can piece together by googling SMILES, the system has been evolving. Apparently, chemical graphics software out there has captured particular editions of SMILES at the time when their revision is released.  It would be nice if some international standard were in place to devise an enduring syntactical structure. Seems like something CAS could help with.