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Uhh... going pretty strong. Prices have been gradually coming down and there is a lot of interest from industry. However, since batteries have also improved in the meantime, the focus is moving away from consumer applications (cars) to larger ones (ships, buses, trucks, trains, even regional planes), so they are not so visible to the man in the street.

I do work in hydrogen & fuel cells, and in the last 2-3 years we have seen a surge in industrial interest we can barely handle. We know that FC manufacturers are tooling for mass production, at which point prices will fall a lot faster. At this point we are where batteries were about 15 years ago, with some applications ready for deployment (buses, home CHP, trucks, trains) and plenty of others in advanced development—maritime is likely the next big thing.

So just because you don't hear about it in the 9 o'clock news it does not mean it has been abandoned. It has simply dipped down from the hype peak and started maturing.

Interesting how its all about Germany while it's made by a French company - because it will run on German tracks and the trans conference is in Germany.
The PR material is also all French people http://www.alstom.com/innotran...

I guess its just sounds better if its "German".

The world's first CO2-emission-free train powered through hydrogen was unveiled this week in Germany.

Note that they haven't built or sold any production units yet. Just some prototypes.

The train's energy comes from combining hydrogen stored in tanks on the train with oxygen in the air.

It's a fuel cell system so yeah, that's kind of how it works.

The energy is then stored in lithium-ion batteries.

The company that makes this train says nothing about Li-Ion batteries being involved.

The train's only emissions are steam and condensed water.

Correct but misleading. The real emissions depend on how the hydrogen was produced. If they got it by cracking hydrocarbons then the real emissions are considerably nastier than just water.

With respect, where the hell are you getting this from and why are you so confident? Your odd 620C isn't very hot at all - scroll down to superheated steam boilers:

1. Did you follow the links I posted? They're right there.
2. RDK8, Karlsruhe, Germany, 600C & 620C (reheat) steam temperature 46% net efficiency. I posted the temperatures as a link earlier, so why are you asking now?

Since with nuclear you don't hit the same limit of flame temperature so you can go far hotter and get greater efficiency, but you have to pay for that in other ways.

Ah, I see the problem now. Okay, here's the reason why modern high efficiency fossil fuel plants have higher steam temperatures(And therefore efficiency) than traditional nuclear plants. You mentioned neutron bombardment, but neglect a crucial fact: Current nuclear power plant cores are liquid water cooled. Depending on the design, the water even acts as a moderator - no water, the reaction doesn't work right. In order to keep water liquid at these high temperatures, you have to pressurize the reactor. There's a limit on how much pressure you can build the vessel to withstand, thus the limit on steam temperature with BWR/PWR reactors. Now, if you switch to liquid metal, salt, or even helium you can do away with most of that pressure, and are thus free to raise the temperature. Heck, with the first two you can theoretically run the reactor at 1 atm. There's even some theoretical reactors that exceed the melting point of Uranium, and operate completely in a liquid state. Still, all the commercial nuclear reactors in the USA right now, and most of the rest of the world, are of the BWR/PWR type.

So, you've mentioned 2200K - 1, 927C. I've posted sources on
A BWR operates at ~75 atm, and a PWR around 158. That limits a BWR to 269C, and a PWR to 315C using this calculator.

With fossil fuel power plants, as you've amply proven, you don't have any need for the water to be liquid, and you CAN get the temperatures up into the supercritical range.

Since with nuclear you don't hit the same limit of flame temperature so you can go far hotter and get greater efficiency, but you have to pay for that in other ways. Making it as large as you can makes some costs less of a percentage of the total which is why they have to be very large to compete.

The sources I'm seeing say that the large pressure vessel needed makes having it handle higher pressures MORE difficult, not less.

Either I must have missed the 6000BC steam powered industrial revolution or you've made a very incorrect assumption. Take a look at this paper which turned up near the top of a google search and note the flame regions at 2200K in a diagram in section 4.1 (http://flox.com/documents/03_Coal.pdf)

Why are you trying to prove me right? Back on the pollution stuff - there's a lot of cutting edge technology even in coal today.

I'm sure there's more, but I have to go.

Call you names? That's not good debating technique. I might attack ideas, but not you. Line breaks would be nice though.

Why invent a new personal definition of peak oil? Just look it up instead of making shit up, but at least you had the decency to list your own personal definiton.

I thought my definition was pretty much standard? It's the point where oil production levels out and starts decreasing because extraction costs have risen to the point that increasing production further isn't economical. Whether that's because the economic gain is less than the cost, or because an alternate has risen that has a better benefit ratio.

There has been a lot of progress and reactors such as pebble bed (built) and accelerated thorium (under construction) are showing a lot of promise, and reactors such as the AP1000 (under construction) could come close.

Pebble bed reactors aren't showing as much progress as I'd like. I really like the promise of thorium. I'm not a fanboy of 1970's tech, matter of fact, I'd be supporting shutting down the reactors from that time period as soon as we finished replacing the coal power plants(sooner in a few cases).

The edge nuclear power has over coal and oil is much higher steam temperatures - that advantage comes with a cost in materials which becomes less important as the scale increases.

Source on this? Hate to break it to you, but to my knowledge coal plants(~374C) actually get their steam HOTTER than nuclear plants(~350C). Heck, there's a coal fired plant that reaches 600-620C. This could be fixed by newer nuclear plant designs, but the old designs just don't get that hot. I'm also irked that our environmental regulations often mean older, less efficient and more polluting plants keep operating under grandfather clauses than getting new plants built. That goes for ALL plant designs, coal, nuclear, even gas.

There's not much more 'exotic technology' in a nuclear reactor, one could even argue that there's less, than what's in a modern 'clean coal' plant.

At this time financial (not political) constraints along with the technological ones are preventing the construction of much in the way of nuclear reactors - in fact it's a political action to override that and get one built.

An absolutely HUGE portion of the cost is the permitting process, and that's political. Fix that and you'd see more reactors built. Personally, my goal power proportions is 40% nuclear, 20% wind, 20% solar, 20% other(hydro, biomass, etc...)
Right now, about 20% of power in the USA is nuclear and is provided by 104 reactors. So figure on building ~208(increase to 40%, decommission the older less safe reactors). But new reactors tend to be bigger than the old ones: Another calc: 806.2 TWh/year. A 1 GW reactor like the AP1000 should produce ~8TWh a year. So replacement would only be 100 reactors, or 200 to both expand and replace. Of course, the AP1000 is actually a 1.2GW reactor, so it'd only be 167 reactors. Figure on a 5 year build, break ground on 1 this year, 2 next, then 3 and so on, and you'd be finishing up in 25 years assuming a few delays. Peak would be 18 years from now, starting up 14-18, depending on slippage and expansion.
167 more or less identical reactors would give you lots of comparative advantage on safety and maintenance engineering costs. Still, I think that making a quarter of them AP1000, and 75% other standardized designs would be good. Don't forget to set them up to use the waste heat for something useful, if possible. Up in Alaska use some of the micro-nuclear plants to also provide steam for heating buildings. Some of those are in the single digit to low double Megawatt. Heck, get a thorium design out, and at least build a test plant.

Modern Combined Cycle Power Plants like the ones built around an Alstom GT26 turbine get around 60% efficiency.

NY Times article

Alstom's own press release, with some additional details on the train configuration and tests

Wikipedia's entry on land speed rail records

In many areas France and the UK are ahead of the game in naval technology. For example electrical propulsion which is how most naval vessels will be powered in the future (The engines are large electrical motors, in pods rather than directly driven. quieter, more flexible and more maneuverable). The latest british destroyer(Type 45) has this technology and is so ahead of the game that it will probably be the basis of the propulsion technology for the american DD(X) ships. There is no reason to belive that France and UK does not have the technology, what they probably do lack is the operational experience on how to use the systems.

But with a cheap launch technology, it's the individuals who will truly explore space. Once we're out of Earth's gravity well, private explorers could pretty much go anywhere provided they stocked enough food. Solar cells will provide unlimited energy, and a solar sail the unlimited propulsion. Advanced recycling equipment will minimize the loss of water and other necessities, and a decent internet connection will keep the travelers from feeling too cut off.


Many of those problems have already been solved by the ocean liner industry. Under financial pressure to reduce operating costs, they have been working on ways of make cruise ships more fuel efficient (using azipods), along with working out ways to make life comfortable for passengers, the 'space ratio').

Some (the Queen Mary 2) even have their own planetarium.

If we could work out how to build or launch something like one of these liners in Earth orbit (using standard construction techniques), and add radiation shielding, we could cruise the solar system in style and safety.

The specification of an ocean liner read like something out of Star Trek.

Power consumption = 118 Megawatts,
Propulsive power = 86 Megawatts
Steering = 4 azipods (2 fixed, 2 directional)
Decks = 15
Cabins = 1330 (all with Internet access)
Passengers = 2620
Crew = 1310

For comparision, the space shuttle can transport 200 tonnes back to Earth (landing weight), and consumes 7 - 12 Kilowatts of power for all of its electrical systems, while the booster rockets and main engines are rated at 11.7 GigaWatts

Bombardier makes the TGV ? That would be news to Alstom, one of Bombardiers main competitors.

There is a page on the Alstom site (an official sponsor of the project) here.