Why Engineering Projects are so Expensive

Time and Time again, we often hear about and see news about various projects that are getting taken on … often with outrageous price tags attached to them. Most of the time, the price tag is mentioned merely as a footnote to the project or touted as the headline about how grand the project actually is.

At the more local level, a 6.4km stretch of road comes in at a hefty $156 Million (AUD) … $24 Million per kilometre. When we get to other or more exotic projects, the costs are just as impressive.

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The Nuclear Fusion Fantasy

At the bottom of 2022 there was a key piece of news that probably went overlooked by many … the National Ignition Facility [NIF][1] in California achieved one of the biggest scientific milestones to date … the ignition condition for nuclear fusion.

So, what is ignition?

Ignition is defined as the state where the nuclear reaction becomes self-sustaining – also the point where the reaction produces more power than it takes to get going … the Q>1 state. [2]

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Can Rising Interest Rates Stop Inflation?

When it comes to the markets, things have been a bit all over the place … so much so trying to make sense of things is frankly maddening. But its safe to say that the topics that have been dominating have been Inflation and the federal reserve … and its commitment to fighting inflation.

But investors and traders themselves are doing their bit … seemingly on a day to day basis. You don’t have to look through too much history (re: the S&P 500 index) just in the last few months to see whiplashing movements in both directions, where each downward movement is followed by some article about ‘Worries of inflation pushes markets lower …’, each upward movement followed by trailing headlines, ‘Worries of inflation easing …’

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It’s Time to talk about Energy

It only takes a cursory look through the blog roll here to see that to date there have been two primary topics of discussion; ‘Education for Business’ and ‘Financial Independence for wealth.’ Hardly two interests that you would expect to find under a website or company with ‘Industries’ in its name.

Education frankly (as the web traffic highlights) isn’t a sexy subject, and personal finance is a deeply polarizing subject, particularly when we weigh up personal values in concert with the ‘have’s’ and the ‘have nots’. My personal interest in finance actually has far less to do with having more of it, than the ability to leverage it as a tool – to use it for bigger and better … ‘Industrial’ things!

However in recent times, bigger things have taken centre stage – and at the foundational level we get to the matter of ‘Energy’.

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