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Modified Prius gets up to 180 Miles Per Gallon
shupp writes "The NY Times (free reg. required) reports in that some folks are not content with the no-plug-in rule that both Honda and Toyota endorse. By modifying a Prius so that it can be plugged in, Ron Gremban of CalCars states 'I've gotten anywhere from 65 to over 100 miles per gallon'. The article also reports that 'EnergyCS, a small company that has collaborated with CalCars, has modified another Prius with more sophisticated batteries; they claim their Prius gets up to 180 mpg, and can travel more than 30 miles on battery power.'"
anyone think that the oil companies might have something to do with this not being adopted on a larger scale?
They've secretly replaced the gas with Folgers crystals. Let's see if they notice.
"By modifying a Prius so that it can be plugged in...
;-)
The 180 miles per gallon must be some extremely tough-to-calculate average since a car that's plugged in can only go as far as the power cord (unless they got a really , really, really long power cord
This is misleading. Is it 180mpg sustained? On a 10gal tank of gas, will it go 1800 miles??
Obviously not. Adding extra batteries and charging them up will let the car initially give better "mileage"; heck, in the first 20-30 miles it may give infinite mpg because it is not burning any fuel. But the true measure of mpg is sustained travel over a long distance under somewhat realistic conditions (like city driving or highway driving).
it's about time. you'll be seeing more Bio-Diesel / Hybrids on the road very soon.
I'm not trying to bash what these guys have done - but isn't plugging it in and then looking at MPG very decieving?
On the other hand, it would be interesting to see how the $/mile stack up to see whether or not a plugged in prius can be more efficient in terms of cost.
When something like this happens it becomes amazingly clear that an industry can die. This type of car shows how quickly a hybrid car could kill the the heavy dependence on gas, but the electric companies go crazy. It's a fine line of balance, but it all comes down to politics and everyone knows it.
It's idiotic to give a "miles per gallon" figure when you don't include the cost of producing the electricity you use to recharge the battery.
This reminds me of the tuner shops like shelby and such setting new standards for then detroit.
well with gas at $2.45 a gallon (southern cali) news like this is welcomed. I can't wait for the day when tuner shops specialize in modifying hybrids for longer range. the new ford cotsworth 80 mpg woot woot
How much is 65 to 100 miles per gallon in miles per litre?
Doing it that way, they should have gotten infinite miles to the gallon. Of course they also, like always, fail to count the fuel burned to create the grid electricity in the first place, don't they.
Well, okay, "free" in the sense that I've already paid for the solar setup -- but with oil prices rising, I suspect charging a car from my solar cells would make them pay for themselves a couple years ahead of schedule.
Has anyone noticed the date at the top of the article? This should've been Slashdotted yesterday.
And before the eco-kooks chime in that it's electric and so cleaner, it's not. The article point out that 60% of the country's electricity comes from burning dirtier coal. Much like hydrogen powered cars really just shift the polution to a very wasteful and poluting production of hydrogen away from the car, the plug in car talked about here may not be bringing any real benefit. We need real numbers to know if it is, and they are not given.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
What is the cost of the energy required to charge the batteries?
What is the cost of disposing of the batteries once they have become unusable (which they will)?
How much additional energy (regardless of source) is consumed by hauling the substantial extra weight of the batteries?
Are the people who are doing this also pressing for more nuclear energy plants?
Certainly. The same oil companies that tricked John DeLorean into buying cocaine, squashed the 500-mpg carburator, and killed the genius who invented the car that would run on snot.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
It is completely possible that a modified Prius could sustain 180 MPG for more than a couple dozen miles. The more powerful the battery, the more the electric motor can help the car accelerate, which is what uses the most gas in the conventional motor. That way, the gas engine pretty much just powers the car while it is coasting, and those of you with newer cars with the "instantanious MPG readout" can attest that over 100 MPG can be attained for relatively long periods if you are crusing on a flat highway.
In TFA, it said the price of adding plug-in tech was $3,000 to a hybrid vehicle. However, to recoup that $3,000 would require you to save about 1,300 gallons of gas (at 2.25/gal). If you were getting 50MPG, and bumped it up to 100MPG, you'd have to drive at least 130,000 miles to recoup it - and that doesnt even count the fact that you'd be spending money on electricity, that would only increase the amount of miles driven.
It can help in other ways, perhaps the power plant where you are getting the electricity from is cleaner burning (or nuclear) than your car, and it reduces overall air pollution.
The Doormat
If you're not outraged, then you're not paying attention.
Obligatory Simpsons Quote: "My car gets 40 rods to the hogshead and that's the way I likes it!"
There is no sig, there is only Zuul.
So? You have limited emissions to a very few sources, instead of having to worry about tens of thousands of catalytic converters and pollution control systems. It is a lot easier to deal with one or very few sources.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
Why are these people so ecstatic that they've reduced gasoline consumption at the pump? Electric power by and large comes from oil and coal. I wouldn't be surprised if the oil->electricity->car battery charging pathway through the wall socket consumes more total oil than the oil->gasoline->hybrid car pathway does.
Get over it. The market does not provide what you actually want and it doesn't provide things which are safe or effecient. It produces things which are effecient to the market and nothing else.
The secret is to only drive downhill.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
Still, it's a claim to be approached cautiously. Perhaps improved batteries can improve hybrid milage -- but by a factor of 3? In any case, the "up to" is a hint that this is one of those meaningless "gee whiz" statistics, as with "The IQ of Slashdot users is as high as 300."
If this was adapted on a larger scale, it would cause revenue havoc for the states.
California is already suggesting taxing by the mile rather by the gallon as there revenue decreases from these energy efficient cars.
Maybe this is why they have the no plug in rule? It would be much more difficult to tax by the mile when you could charge up anywhere.
Even though these cars are using more electrical, they're still getting electricity from a grid largely powered by filthy coal and gas power plants, and through a system that's most likely less efficient than the car's internal power grid. They might be using less gasoline in the car, but in the grander scheme they're creating more pollution by making the power plants burn even more for them.
Yes, they are leaving us behind. When shall we hear of GMs, Chevys, Fords and other American companies making news as firsts in their respective fields? As our CEOs, CFOs and their cronies struggle with corruption allegations, the Japanese and Russians are slowly dominating us. One can hardly find an American music/video system now...next will be the automobile. We may fall just like the once great Romans did. Remember the Roman Empire?
At approximately 112000 BTU/gallon of gasoline that's about 33kWh/gal. In California where the prices are about $0.12/kWh electric, it costs you about $4.00/gallon saved. With gas prices at about $2.40 in CA that's about $1.60 extra per gallon saved.
For those of you who say "fuel savings at any cost" consider that most of the california electricity is generated by burning natural gas, and that there are considerable losses involved in generating and transmitting the electricity.
Nothing to see here at the moment. Wait until the price of gas goes to $5.00 and then buy some solar panels to charge your car (or at least net-meter your electricity).
((lambda (x) (x x)) (lambda (x) (x x))) http://www.endpointcomputing.com a scientific approach to custom computing.
Of course I didn't RTFA, that's cheating.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
17 to 26 miles per litre.
The 180 miles a gallon might help you economically, but the electricity costs alot enviomentally so if that is your motivation you arn't getting any real benifit, but if all you care about is money then i guess you luck out. Greedy Bastard.
a car that's plugged in can only go as far as the power cord (unless they got a really , really, really long power cord
Let's see... when you're not on a long-distance road trip, how long are you away from parking where (given infrastructure) you could charge your car's battery? Drive to work, park and charge, drive home, park and charge, rinse and repeat.
The point that they're making is that you can improve the mileage by charging the batteries from the wall jacket instead of burning gasoline to charge them. I give two thumbs up for less dependency on OPEC.
I saw a French research company that is making cars run off of compressed air. Using a Carbon-fibre based compressed air canister, the PSI in the tank is about around 3500 or 3800. There is enough air in the tank to drive about 130 to 180 km @ 60 KM/H.
This is really interesting. The technology is out now. And, AFAIK, this form of transportation is emmissionless.
Just as a curiosity, though, why type of hybrid technologies do we have for *airplanes*. Our economy relies so heavily on planes that we need to find alternatives. IANA-Engineer, but I doubt a 747 would run on solar.
Anyone think that though nervous, the oil industry isn't too worried yet because despite the conspiracy theories, the real reasons that these systems haven't been adopted yet are because they are inconvenient, expensive as hell and terribly useful for anything beyond short trips. Plus there's the whole; "I'd rather have a V8" or "if it weighs less than 6,000 pounds, I'm not interested" mentality.
/SARCASM
SARCASM Naw, your probably right. It's the Saudi oil cartel that is controlling the development of the automobile and exerting mind control on the consumer. That's what it is.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/02/business/02plug. html
You're missing the point... it's not the money you can save that is the point... it's making us less dependent on oil.
It's easy to drive downhill all the time. All you need is larger back tires.
when I did this for a month my house electric bill was $23,897.23.
Now I know what's my next car is going to be... I'll order one on Monday.
How many pounds of coal are used for him to plug it in overnight?
It's a lot easier and potentially cheaper to make one coal power plant more efficient than to make thousands of gasoline automobiles more efficient.
... Any talk about switching to either H2 or e- power for cars really depends on breaking thru the nuclear superstition barrier. We don't have 50 years to wait for fusion (hasn't practical fusion power been 50 years away for over 50 years?).
Then again, why even bother.. The Chinese will have PBRs and in 10 years, they'll own and operate GM and/or Ford anyway (after having bought them out of bankrupcy and smashed the UAW)...
I didn't know it was the same link, it must be accessed from google's news page though. http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&ned=us&q=Hybrid- Car+Tinkerers+Scoff+at+No-Plug-In+Rule&btnG=Search +News
The book "The Bottomless Well" noted that if you get batteries good enough, meaning light enough and small enough volume, able to travel for a normal day's travel (say 250 miles) & inexpensive enough, to fit in a car that you can potentially drop your cost per mile for power to 10% of that using gasoline today.
How? Off peak power now at night (when stationary power plants would love to sell you power) is $.03-$.04 per KWHr, versus about $.40/kwhr for gasoline.
Altair Nanotechnologies, Inc. (NASDAQ:ALTI) received 2 patents on a way to make Li-ion batteries that charge in minutes and hold 3 times the charge in January 2005, and Fujitsu just announced they will start shipping batteries probably licensed under this patent in 2006.
All-electric cars are FAR FAR closer to practicality than people think because of these dramatic technology breaththroughs.
They're using more than 1 gallon for those 180 miles - back at the power generator plant. More gallons of oil, or more cubic meters of gas, more pounds of coal, more grams of uranium/plutonium, more gallons of riverwater. The electric bill might be lower than the gasoline pump charges, or it might not. But electric delivery wastes about 2/3 of the power just getting to the socket into which the car is plugged. Hybrid cars are a great way to improve efficiency, mostly through regeneration of braking and more efficient electric booster motors. Fudging the numbers is a sure way to destroy the credibility of the marginal improvements that we need to get us off our terminal petro addiction before it's too late. Charge your hybrid, but be honest about the costs.
--
make install -not war
What I'm getting at is that before you drop many Gs to save some gas by tricking out your Prius or buying one of these hybrid jobs, first make sure your tires are filled up nice and good and see what happens. Parenthetically, the car's allignment magically fixed itself after the tire inflations.
Or better. It is a definite improvement to replace thousands (millions) of smokestacks, one on every car, with just a few (the ones on the power plants).
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
Can any techie out there explain whether it is more efficient to use a gallon of oil to make gasoline, or to use half a gallon to make gas, use the other 1/2 gallon to make power, transfer this power to the prius, and then drive? I mean even electricity must come from somewhere; for all I know energy dispersion might burn all of the (potential) savings.
Are hybrid cars saving anything to society? Are they saving any money to the driver?
the new ford cotsworth 80 mpg
Will get spanked by a great big honking Cadillac Escalade. The Escalade with beat the hybrid off the line, through the quarter mile and onward. Then it will backup and crush that pussy Ford shit.
And if they aren't? Upgrade them. There are so few of them to upgrade compared to all the car engines out there. The same applies to improving the pollution control at the emission point.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
Isn't this a little off-topic? What does where you go to buy fish have to do with it at all?
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
BS! Hummers only get 14mpg when idling downhill with a stiff wind blowing in their general direction :-P
[And before the eco-kooks chime in that it's electric and so cleaner, it's not. The article point out that 60% of the country's electricity comes from burning dirtier coal. Much like hydrogen powered cars really just shift the polution to a very wasteful and poluting production of hydrogen away from the car, the plug in car talked about here may not be bringing any real benefit.]
;^) No pollution at all, unless you live near Yucca. Or on a railroad that heads to Yucca. Or an interstate. Well, you get the picture.
The benefit here is that we can run cars on something *other* than gasoline; we have a babelfish of energy, so to speak. Sure, we burn a ton of coal now -- and that probably won't change any time real soon. But with electric cars, we'll have the potential to turn clean, safe, efficient fission generated power into hats of money!
But once we have this and cold fusion, watch out. It wouldn't be another seventy years before gas becomes harder to find.
Hrm, that became much more cynical than I'd originally expected. Anyhow, mark my words -- soon we'll be driving on fission power.
It's all 0s and 1s. Or it's not.
Too bad coal dust and carbon isn't the only thing that comes out of a coal powerplant's chimney... add in silicon, aluminum, iron, calcium, magnesium, titanium, sodium, potassium, arsenic, mercury, and sulfur plus small but not insignificant quantities of uranium and thorium.
Then put it in the air.
If you live next to a coal powerplant, you're getting much more radiation exposure than if you lived next to a nuclear plant (assuming both are in compliance with regulations)
=Smidge=
pshaw. I only drive my hummer downhill in neutral with the engine off. Even with the engine off, the thing still guzzles gas, however. No idea how they managed this one!
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
"I'll tell you what. I'll set up two cabins. One will have a bucket of nuclear waste under the bed. The other will have a bucket coal dust and carbon under the bed. Which bed do you choose to sleep in?"
Wow. That's a great argument.
Of course, in the REAL WORLD, we don't sleep over nuclear waste. Oh, and in the REAL WORLD, coal emissions end up in the air we breathe.
So, here's a choice: we produce a small amount of nuclear waste - waste that is disposed of away from humans and in a safe manner - or - we produce a large quantity of pollution and dump it into the atmosphere.
Nuclear waste is dangerous, but there are regulations and procedures in place to ensure its safe disposal.
With coal power, production by-products are simply dumped into the air. Yes, there are regulations, but as long as we are burning fossil fuels, there will always be substantial emissions.
Strawman. Unlike coal dust (which settles onto people property and into their lungs), Nuclear waste does not sit 'under peoples beds'. It's kept contained in the reactor or the cooling ponds, then sent to a remote (100miles to nearest town) location, and buried deep in the ground in an area that is geologically stable. ...or it would be if the f'ing anti-nuke people would stop opposing Yucca mountain and similar plans.
A better example would be set up two cabins and in one keep all the waste that home generates from a nuke plant. And in the other all the waste from a coal plant. Give me a small lead container for the nuke stuff and you are good to go.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
i RTFA, and i picked up on something on the second page (people read past the first page! gasp!). :) the quote was from a mr. furia (no, not the one from mystery men) at AFS trinity power.
"If you've got a flywheel with your chemical battery, you can draw down the chemical battery, but when it's time to do a heavy lift, to accelerate or absorb energy, the flywheel is doing the acceleration or the absorption, not the chemical battery," said Mr. Furia, whose company is developing its own plug-in hybrid that it says will get several hundred miles per gallon.
here's some info on the designs they have coming out. i want one now!
nothing worth possessing isn't possessed. or something.
Excellent example because as everyone knows the bed-and-bucket method is actually how energy is produced.
...except they really haven't found a safe place for it yet, so much of it just sits around.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
Would be nice if Prius has a socket so one can put those windshield solar panel for recharge the battery when the car sit idle out in the sun. that's like 9 hours out in the sun when I'm at work.
Your modification makes no grammatical sense. "NYT claim that plug-in technology would add $2000 to $3000 to the cost of a hybrid car" in that sentence is a compound noun: the claim made by the NYT that [...]. Taking out all the modifiers, his sentence is "The NYT claim is pure BS." Your proposed modification to "The NYT claims is pure BS." does not work.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Yes. Firstly there is the direct inefficiency of the transformers and the resistance in the wires.
Secondly there are the resources wrapped up in the distribution network itself.
There is an equivalent loss in distributing gasoline of course. Roughly 12% of the calorific value of oil pumped from the ground is used in processing and distribution of the final gasoline.
And I have to say they're fucking brilliant!
I'm VERY happy with the 22km per ltr (4.4 ltrs per 100km) that I'm currently getting.
Pics here:
www.modmeup.net/gallery
"Consider how lucky you are that life has been good to you so far. Alternatively, if life hasn't been good to you so far
Till then, I will be driving my Pontiac Grand Prix GT2.
I bet I'll be filling up with Corn Juice first.
"Overlook Hospital? How obvious can you get?"
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
Aha! So that explains why my Prius seems so perky today :-)
Most power in the U.S. is produced at coal-fired power plants, which aren't exactly environmentally friendly.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
In other words, they modified these "hybrid" cars to be true hybrid cars, vehicles which run on two (or more) energy sources. I am always peeved by supposed hybrid cars which only accept gasoline as a primary fuel source.
I have owned a hybrid car (Honda Insight) for almost 3 years now. While it is a completely different hybrid system than a Prius, they are still kind of the same animal.
For instance, my Insight, if I drive somewhere where it is flat, little/no wind, and drive very gingerly about 45 mph, it can get above 100 mpg. With some trips (say 20 miles), I have managed to keep the trip mileage over 100 mpg.
However, my lifetime mpg is about 56 mpg, because I don't drive the car gingerly, and instead move with traffic to keep my fellow commuters happy.
Here's where the problem with this is: If you drive gingerly and get 100 mpg, you aren't using the electrical power, and therefore it doesn't NEED to be charged. And with a 'stock' Insight, if you were to somehow charge the batteries without the car knowing it, the car will basically drain the batteries and allow the to recharge (called recalibration).
Obviously, some of these behaviors can be changed, but that requires reprogramming the computers (about 8 of them IIRC), without any assistance from Honda/Toyota.
For one, they haven't yet found anything safe to do with the waste. For another, there have been so many near catastrophic accidents. You don't have to evacuate a city when ANY pipe breaks for a coal plant. You did not mention this, but it has also been extremely expensive compared to everything else.
"2) Using oil/coal/gas, etc in ONE location makes it easier to clean- only ONE smokestack needs to be dealt with, instead of thousands of car exhausts all over the place."
You are right on this!
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
The biggest surprise was how BAD the original fuel consumption on the Prius was before the modification. 40-45mpg? That's the same as a typical small car would get - and the Prius *is* a small car. So why pay so much money for all this technology which amounts to a car that's LESS fuel efficient than a lot of normal petrol cars at half the price which can easily get 65+mpg? (Yank Tanks excluded of course, but most environmentally concious countries have many cars that can achieve these levels of efficiency).
..and I don't even think the review took into account the enormous additional environmental damage and costs of disposing of the car at each end of it's lifetime (mainly due to the batteries).
The Prius was featured on the BBC's Top Gear program recently here in the UK and the general gist of the review as far as I remember was "why on earth are all the stupid celebrities and Americans spending a fortune buying these cars from the Japanese which are WORSE for the environment than a normal petrol car at HALF the price?".
If you want to save the environment, buy a small/light car with a small engine (sub 1.2L) and drive it sensibly.
First of all, that huge power plant tends to be a bit more efficient and optimized than your Hummer.
Secondly, who says that the energy has to be from Diesel?
Finally, most of the energy loss will come from the coal/whatever - conversion to power, and suboptimal usage. Since you will most likely recharge your battery at night, you would help to reduce waste of energy.
As for radiation, coal fired power plants typically emit more radiation than nuclear power plants. For that matter, some sources of uranium are actually coal. (note: might be thorium, its been a few years since I was active in nuclear energy). In addition you have heavy metals like mercury and arsenic. Not only are they in the coal ash, they get into the air. On top of this are the sulfer dioxides, nitrous oxides, carbon dioxide, fly ash, etc, etc. Nuclear waste is no day at the beach, but coal is no picnic either. And remember, in between 300 and 1200 years the radioactive waste will be less toxic than the ore it came from (depending on which way you measure toxicity). A million years from now the arsnic and mercury in coal ash will be just as toxic.
Have you ever been in a TDI Bug or Jetta? Smooth as silk. Diesels rock. I hope they do start making diesel hybrids, because they'll get over 100mpg and can burn soybeans.
A lot of the old pure-battery cars were marred by the fact that you couldn't go very far on them.
The hybrid concept is great, but I imagine manufacturers wanted to distance it from the pure-electric cars. A lot of people would have assumed that if a car had a power cord, it would have the same problems as the pure-electric systems.
So instead, you expose people to gasoline-only cars with relatively high gas-milages. Later on, once people have accepted that these new things work well enough, you can add a power cord. And even market it as "New and Improved!"
Basically, you don't want the public to assume that the power cord limits where you can go with it.
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
and its not really doing anything either, so why are you complaining?
Ok, so, it works something like this.
1) You plug your car into the house.
2) Your house gets electricty from "somewhere."
3) That somewhere is a diesel fired power plant.
4) The electric company notifies the cops of your excessive electricity usage.
5) Armed narcotics agents arrive with a search warrant and ransack your house looking for a grow operation.
You'd have to be nuts to plug a car into the wall if you live in the United States.
" bike in Paris, and I'm afraid I'm inflicting severe damage to my lungs" Screaming loud insults in French at the careless drivers who try to run you off the street every 6 seconds can have cause cumulative damage.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
Just a thought.
I heard the reason a turbocharger was better that a supercharger is because there is waste energy (expanding gas) still in the exaust system, and a turbo uses the extra energy to compress air for the engine. This causes some backpresure, but is more efficient that a superchager. A supercharger is driven by the engine itself.
Is it possible to improved a hybrid by modifying a turbocharger? Take the turbo's exauste turbine and connect it to a small generator? The generator/turbo would use the extra energy to charge the battery or provide extra power for the motors
Also if you wanted more power, you could add an electric supercharger. Like from the following site
http://www.esuperchargers.com/
You mean we will still be making the Bush family rich with our energy needs?
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
I mean, come on! Hamster wheels are weak enough as it is!
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
The only reason I do not purchase a hybrid car, is that those things do not have the ooomph of raw gasoline powered vehicles. I remember the article posted a while back, about the electric race car, and I understand that electric motors give instant torque--but that's why you either drop the clutch or torque break your hotrod. I do not forsee a reasonable future, where an electric car, with todays technology, can be purchased comparitevly to a powerful gasoline car. Some people do not like to go fast, that's fine, many others do. While I do not make my GTO raise up like in 'Fast and the Furious', the capability assures me that I can get up and go in a timely manner. Another important factor is the fact you can dramatically increase horsepower in a gasoline engine AND reduce overall weight. To increase power in an electric car, you have to ADD significant weight countering any improvements--batteries are very heavy, carry a Sears car battery through the parking lot. Electric cars are not a viable solution, unless they can find a way to produce the electricty within the same weight of a gasoline engine (which some cars, their engines are so small and made of aluminum, that the average person can hand pick the engine out of the car.) Until then, the average electric car will always be inferior to gasoline power. Just my opinion.
I urge all readers of these lively threads to view our Fact Sheet, found at http://www.priusplus.org/ -- paying special attention to the fact that our MPG results must be combined with the electricity used.
Also look at the new section at our vehicles page where we document the benefits of PHEVs even when they're recharged from a dirty (coal-fueled) grid.
We've added a link to this discussion at http://www.calcars.org/kudos.html
Felix Kramer, Founder, CalCars
Founder, California Cars Initiative and PRIUS+ Campaign
The only problem with these is if you're charging a battery that can run a (say) 30-kW engine for two hours, that's 216 MJ of energy you're putting into the batteries (more, because of losses, but whatever). Say you want to charge the thing, for convenience, in two minutes. That's 1.8 MW power draw to charge the battery (again, neglecting losses). On a (say) 240V RMS home circuit, that's a 7500 amp current draw! Yikes, that's one thick wire to charge your car...
Karma: pi (Mostly due to circular reasoning in posts).
You go to the gas station with your Prius and a long extension cord, plug it in around back, and shop around the gas station while "filling up." Until an employee on a smoke break sees you sneaking around with an extension cord, of course...
The batteries get all their energy from the gasoline engine.
So if these batteries are 3 times better, it means the regular batteries throw away at least 2/3 of that energy. That seems impossible in several different ways.
the problem with nuke plants is the "worst case scenario".
If you have a Coal plant, and lose it - you might burn to the fence line.
If you have a Nuke plant, and really lose it, you have Chernobyl.
Nuke energy is relatively expensive due to regulatory compliance. Needed regulations mind you, but thats why you dont see many nuke plants go up these days.
Coal is going to be the big electriciy producing thing for the forseeable future. Its insanely cheap, and the US has a whole lot of it.
... hi bingo
Of course, the Prius is driving in circles around a post with the extension cord coming out of it.
Of course, the vomit/mile value is MUCH higher than usual.
the folgers is much better than the last gas tank that I siphoned.
It doesn't take a lot of power to keep a car's engine from getting cold enough that it's trouble to restart; recharging the batteries is a lot more power than that.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
If you could plug in right at the power plant,
you'd be better off with the EV. Transmission
line losses can be huge though, making the EV
come out worse.
The unknown factor: is there a power plant in
your backyard?
Depending on usage scenarios, this could result in considerably less pollution being produced. Electric companies must keep generators going 24 hours per day. For the most part, they have a large surplus of power at night. If that excess power is used to recharge vehicle batteries, energy that is now going to waste will be put to use transporting people. If these vehicles are used mostly for short range trips in the day, such as commuting to work, overall pollution will be reduced by using energy that is currently going to waste during the night.
Financial cost is a decent approximation of
environmental cost in this case. Financial cost
is also what motivates normal people. Well, it
forces them to choose. People really buy cars
for image, and "green" doesn't cut it here.
The trouble with composite tanks is that they are difficult to inspect. If a little corrosion starts due to a pinhole in the jacket, the canister can erode away leaving the jacket untouched. This would especially be a problem for anyone filling tank as they would not be able to tell by quick surface exam that the tank is damaged. The environment the tanks will be in is also not very forgiving. Rainwater, roadsalt, mud, show, etc. are not very good for your car's frame, I see know reason these would not be similarly disastrous for the tank.
Actually, corrosion is a problem for all compressed gas containers. Hydrogen powered cars will have to solve this as well. I have seen a compressed air car using liquid nitrogen as its power source but liquid hydrogen storage is more difficult (-250C versus -80C) This technology is interesting, but remember that filling the tanks is not an efficient process. Heat generated during compression is lost to the environment.
Scuba tanks for instance (operating at about the pressures you described) are visually inspected every year (inside and out) and must be hydrostatically (pressurized to much higher than the typical working pressure and strain measured) tested every five years. I do not know the rational for those particular time periods, but believe that they are DOT regulations (and that there is some logic behind it).
I would assume that these tanks would be filled and drained more frequently than most scuba tanks and so increased frequency of inspections might also be warrented. (though some kind of swappable design may mitigate this)
AFAIK the 747 is one of the more efficient designs (in terms of lbs of fuel per passenger mile). Bigger planes get better efficiency in that regard. I don't believe that the hybrid approach would be useful to planes as it is not useful to cars on the highway either. The two main benefits of the hybrid system in cars is that the engine can be allowed to run at its most effective rate regardless of road conditions (many engines are more efficient at 3000 rpm than 2000 rpm if you can take advantage of it) and regenerative breaking. A vehicle which does not vary its speed or make frequent stops will see no benefit from the hybrid system seen in automobiles.
In fact, a perfectly designed hybrid car should be mass independant: it should not matter how much the car weighs. Only it's cross sectional area into the wind and rolling friction should affect mileage since the energy lost in accelerating would be gained back on breaking.
On a side note, I find it humorous that a french company would be using psi to measure the pressure in the tanks and km to measure the distance travelled.
in SI units, this would be 24,131 kPa(240 atm) - 150 km
or in standard units, 3500 psi ~ 100 miles.
Leaving out, of course, the capacity of the tank.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
No smacknuts. There's a thing called a deadman's switch. And Chernobyl didn't have one because it was a cheap soviet piece of shit. Look at what happened at Three Mile Island. Place suffers failure, and the safetys mean that there aren't any casualties. Then there's the 12 feet of reinforced concrete around the reactor dome. And the real reason you don't see nuke plants is because of the fucking luddites in green peace who run around screaming "YOU CAN'T HUG WITH NUCLEAR ARMS!!!" whenever someone tries to build one. And just the fence line? Hah. Fire doesn't stop at fences and all the wishing in the world won't make it. Oh and because of all those regulations nuclear plants are alot less likely to fail then coal fired plants. So go stuff it monkey fucker.
If you have a Nuke plant, and really lose it, you have Chernobyl.
Wrong.
The design the RUSSIANS used in Chernobyl is NOT the design we use in the US. WHat happened there can't happen here, simply because of the different designs.
If you have a Coal plant, and lose it - you might burn to the fence line
Coal plants require coal. Which means mines. Which means mine disasters, including mine fires and collapses.
Oil plants need oil. Need I refer to pics of the Gulf War oil wells burning?
Both of those produce literally tons of soot and ash that needs to be dealt with. CO2 is produced in LARGE amounts, too.
True- a nuclear plant requires uranium, which means mines too. But uranium, having a higher energy density, is needed in smaller amounts, and therefore, there are fewer mines, fewer disasters. The 'waste' of a nuke plant is a few tons of solid materials than can basically be thrown into the back of a truck and sent for disposal, instead of being released into the air and drawn into people lungs like oil/coal smoke and soot is.
Man, why can't anybody write with some passion around here?
Of course, then you don't need it. Just use the nuke plants to make electricity that uses the existing infrastructure into which you plug in your pluggable-hybrid... just as in the article.
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
"Hey, check out my new Prius, its got the mad hookup and gets over 100mpg boy!"
Buy Steampunk Clothing Online!
I'd prefer superconducting capacitor rings.... ;)
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
The power that comes from your electrical outlet isn't magical. It is coming from some other source through the power-grid, so the gas (or worse, it could be coal where they are) is still being burned up and released into the atmosphere and you're probably being even more wasteful than you would if you just put oil in the car because of power leakages at a distance.
I dislike the oil industry quite a lot, but this sort of thing isn't a solution to our problems at all. Thanks for nothing, fellas!
Place a noookular pellet under the seats of conventional automobiles. Automotive emmisions will reduce to zero in a single generation. Yesssss!
That's not very good mileage.
Oops, I misread the headline.
Anakin Simpson: If you're not with me, then you're my enemy--ooh, donuts!
And I think your point is absolutely dead-on. I get 43-45mpg on the interstate, and with the quoted efficiency of the Prius, there's no real reason for me to buy a Prius and trade in my Tercel, is there?
Incidentally, I've been to both the UK and Ireland in the past 2 years, and I'm (a) astounded at the price of gas and (b) amazed that so many cars get such excellent gas mileage. I wish we stupid Yanks would be confronted with circa $4/gallon prices on regular unleaded; perhaps it would open our eyes and induce us to keep up the research on alternative power plants for passenger vehicles. (Not that the dollar is worth shit now that our monkey-president has let his little personal vendetta play out in the middle east--but that's another story.)
Kudos to the EU in general for the fuel efficiency of cars like the Nissan Micra (my latest rental in Dublin) and the Fiat Panda. It's a disgrace that pieces of crap like Hummers and Ford Excursions are even available in the US. I apologize on behalf of my countrymen to the rest of the world...
But anyway, to return to the original point: it's well said that there's little inducement to switch to a Prius when my old Toyota gets gas mileage that's just as good. And to hammer in my second point: we bloody fackin' Americans should look to the EU for reasonable ideas about our motor vehicles. That's all.
British people really need to learn to speak English correctly. Group nouns should always be plural.
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
We could also say that we got 257 mpg in a brand new unmodified Cadillac Escalade. I simply won't mention that we coasted downhill from the Eisenhower Tunnel down to Denver.
What is going to happen to all the left over batteries?
...try keeping a running total of casualties for both cases. Nuclear power is downright harmless.
First "Altair Nanotechnologies" basically makes specialty powders for surface chemistry applications. Calling this "nanotechnology" is a stretch. What they actually do, as a business, is make titanium dioxide powder, the pigment used in white paint. Read their 10-K filing, which is more honest than the press releases they put out.
Altair claims to be working with the "Energy Storage Research Group" at Rutgers University. That did exist, and, sadly, it's one of the leftover bits of what was once Bell Labs. But what's left of it, at Rutgers, doesn't seem to be doing anything in this area. They're concentrating on capacitors and on hydrogen storage. The Rutgers articles on battery technology seem to stop around 2003.
If you look really hard, you can finally find the technical paper on this. It's from mPhase. They're actually trying to make the battery. But what they say they're doing is building a battery with a very long shelf life for use as a backup power source in telecom gear. That's useful, especiallly since mPhase makes DSL gear for telecom carriers. There's gear out on poles that needs some backup power capability, and most existing batteries don't last long enough to be useful in that environment.
But this is a long way from Electric Cars Real Soon Now.
It would be nice if /. would stop posting non-working links.
i think he means all those three wheeled trucks
I think that getting car propulsion from plug power opens up a whole lot of possibilities even if our current electric generation isn't that green, and people ranging from Burt Rutan who misses his EV-1 to an article in Tau Beta Pi magazine are talking about hybrids to get vehicles that are perhaps 80 percent plug power and only use gasoline to solve the battery range problem.
Missing from the proponents of the plug-power Prius, Burt Rutan, and Tau Beta Pi magazine is discussion of the kWHr cost of battery.
Let me just pull together some numbers, and people can tell me if I am at least in the ballpark-order-of-magnitude. A 10 kWHr lead acid battery pack (i.e. the EV-1 power pack) costs $3000 and allows for 300 charge/discharge cycles (you get many more cycles with shallow discharge, but I am not convinced that you get more total kWHr through the battery). A 10 kWHr pack delivers road power to replace, say, 1 gallon of gas. This is saying that the battery alone is the equivalent of gas at $10/gallon, and if $50/bbl oil is $2.50/gal gas, $10/gallon gas is $200/bbl oil, and at $200/bbl there is all kinds of crud (heavy oil, tar sands, oil shale) that you can turn into gasoline.
Batteries cost money, not just in initial cost but in operating cost because batteries wear out. There are batteries that have more cycles than lead acid, but they also cost more. The Prius uses a NiMH battery, and the consumer NiMH's are said to be good for about 500 cycles. The Prius battery holds much less than the EV-1 battery, and I heard figures of 7000-8000 dollars to replace a Prius battern.
That a battery only does so many charge/discharge cycles has to do with physical chemistry -- it is like you are electroplating and de-electroplating over an over again and how many cycles will a battery plate hold its shape and not crumble? Making oil from shale or tar sands is expensive, not because the operations are pilot-scale but because you have to process a lot of material. Storing energy in a battery is similarly expensive, not because battery production hasn't been ramped up but because just plain wear of the battery elements.
The reason for the Prius (or even Insight) style hybrid is that that batteries cost too much for economical substitution of plug power for gasoline, even for very expensive gasoline. The idea in these types of hybrids is to find where gasoline is used in the most wasteful modes (idling, coasting, stop-and-go-running) and to substitute those modes with battery-stored electricity. You know, if 80 percent of the gasoline does 20 percent of the work, replace that 20 percent with electricity, and even if battery electricity costs 4 times that of gasoline it works out.
Well, maybe it works out. The proof is whether you run a Prius (compared to a Corolla or a Camry, not an SUV!) until you wear out a battery pack and weigh the replacement cost of the battery pack against the cost of the gasoline difference. Even at $2.50/gallon gas I think I am better off with the Camry -- $5/gallon gas may be the crossover point.
But the weak point about batteries, whether you are talking EV-1, battery backup off-grid solar power, or a plug hybrid is that the battery itself is a consumable instead of a durable good, and electricity out of batteries costs several multiple of the cost of gasoline except in those "corner cases" where gasoline is used inefficiently compared to the electric power substitue.
Nuclear waste will last up to 100,000 years. And after the fallout from Yucca Mountain, nobody wants in 'their' backyard. The NRC and DOE have to figure out how to warn people long after the USA no longer exists.
And with wind, spoiled rich people don't wind turbines spoiling their view.
And with Solar, cuurent panels lose 50% of their effectiveness after 20 to 25 years. And then there will be disposal issues.
And Hydrogen harms the Ozone.
And..And..
What the heck ever happend to Fusion, I heard that the experiments done by those Utah fellows have actually been reproduced and there might something to it after all.
I did a bit of research and found out roughly what it would cost.
.4kw per mile of driving. That's about 400 watts, or 1-2 large rooms worth of light bulbs. I believe these figures to be correct because I've seen some similar ones elsewhere.
It turns out that electricity is extremely cheap per unit of energy. According to these folks, it takes about
The national average for electricity is around $ 0.10 per kwh, so this is a phenomenally cheap way to power a car. If we wanted to go 100 miles in a purely electric car, it would take 40 kwh, or $0.40.
I rented a Dodge Neon recently and got only 20mpg from it. (It must have had an old or badly tuned engine). Going 100 miles in the Neon would have taken 5 gallons of gas, at about $ 2.50 a gallon. That's $12.50! Even if I could get the peak mileage of non-hybrid cars, or 40mpg, that's still over $6 to run the car the same number of miles electricity would power for $ 0.40. Even if electric rates doubled, electricity would still be phenomenally cheaper than gas.
So why haven't electric cars taken over the world? Because often you need to go further than the charge range in a day. When I went to Sacramento a year or so ago to visit the Capitol, I decided to try renting an electric car. All it had to do was go about 20 miles, the round trip to and from the Capitol. With extra excursions to find parking and the like, I barely got there and back successfully. On the other hand, I had completely free "fuel". The rental company didn't account for it in any way, because it was, truly, too cheap to meter.
So it seems clear that if you can squeeze a big enough battery into the Prius, you could have the best of both worlds: The economy of having a purely electric car, combined with the "get home" ability of the gas engine.
I should briefly address a specious argument against this idea which seems to have gotten wide currency. Once we Californians got through our tiresome power crisis, we thought that anything that plugged in was Bad. Well, true, during the day when we run hefty air conditioners and the like. But once we've cooled down, demand for power plummets and there is no problem at all with plugging in something like an electric car. In fact, the power companies dearly want this to ramp up demand and enable expensive power plants to run at a higher duty cycle.
Once you express this idea in terms of costs, it becomes, well, pretty obviously a brainy scheme. I wonder why Toyota wants to shut it down, since it seems like a wonderful idea for everyone involved, and really, an amazing PR coup for Toyota.
Hope this helps.
D
You might want to read up on what actually happened before you start spouting Chernobyl as an example.
Not only are US nuclear reactors are significantly safer than Chernobyl could have even dreamt of being, but the majority of fault with Chernobyl was because of human stupidy.
I say stupidity instead of error because there was a lot more than one problem and many of them were done intentionally. They were doing things they shouldn't have been doing to the reactor and when things went wrong they didn't do what they were supposed to do to fix the problem. A lot of the casualties were caused because they didn't follow the clean up procedures we would be following today.
Claiming US nuclear power plants are unsafe because of what happened in Chernobyl is foolish at best.
Shoot Pixels, Not People!
assuming both are in compliance
Ah yes, the fine print. When one of these two complicated machines gets out of "compliance", it has a lot more to offer in the way of "radiation exposure" for the surrounding people and countryside. Chernobyl, in case you're not getting it?
Until the power industry is ready to stop extending the life of unsafe old nukes, and start adopting modern, much safer heat exchange / coolant / shutdown technology, then I would feel much much safer with gas, oil and coal-fired electricity generators.
I live three blocks from ConEd's 14th St. power facility, on the Lower East Side. This one is relatively cleaner plants, but it is not very popular here (it has blown up twice in ten years, and now they're adding more generators.)
As far as I know, there is one state (Idaho?) that requires the power company to pay you for any power you pump back into the system... basically if you have solar or wind, they'll let you run the meter backward if you can.
;)
Now, with everybody charging up their cars during off peak time and driving a short distance to work, you could then plug your car into a public or office power grid terminal and have your car negotiate to sell any capacity that you don't expect to use during the peak hours when power is in demand. If done right, you can specify your bidding algorithm to earn you some money back on that power you hoarded during the night and leave you with enough power to get home, or possibly run a short, unexpected errand. If you goof up, and discover that you need more than expected and your car is pure electric instead of hybrid, then, as soon as you find out, you message your car to change it's bidding strategy and try to buy back enough to get you where you need to go by the time you need to leave, hopefully without putting you in the poor house. This could be even more fun than day-trading
Unfortunately, it's a total fantasy because the infrastructure would require a lot of work and the influential power-lobby would do everything in their power (Oooh! Bad pun!) to prevent it from working.
Signatures are a waste of bandwi (buffering...)
A. Your hacked and modded Prius
B. Your Grandpa's 1950 8-cyclinder Station Wagon
well?
The correct answer is B. .
Everyone seems to take great pleasure in blithely ignoring the fact that it takes energy to build new cars
Even if battery powered cars were the wave of the future, they will merely shift vehicular pollution from gas fired engines to.... coal fired power plants.
If you really want to be a greenie, buy absolutely anything other than a new car.
To appeal to the /. love of numbers, if you're driving a 50 year old car, then the "energy cost" to produce it has been spread out over 50 years.
Even the most inneficient, smoke belching, catalytic converterless relic causes less net pollution compared to building a brand new car.
Most of these hybrids don't even pay for themselves in gas money. They're all small cars. People pay at least $3000 premium over the regular version.
Why? You'd spend what $500~ish per year filling its non-hybrid version up, which means that it'll take years before the premium is worth it.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
I looked at the Toyota Prius and Honda Insight last week and I'm researching them now. A few observations.
One of the ways the hybrid cars get very high gas milage is by modifying the driver's behavior. That's why they put a big LCD screen right in front of you with the current MPG rating in big numbers. When you accelerate fast and brake fast, like in normal traffic, you get lower MPG and it's displayed as driver feedback. When you modify your behavior to maximise MPG, and the MPG feedback displayed right in front of you, you have to accelerate nice and slow and gradually and brake slowly. To maximise MPG you have to drive like Grandma!
While you're calculating the cost of your MPG don't forget to add in the cost of replacing the battery pack. I haven't found a definitive source. But some sources say it may be 'several thousand dollars' to replace the whole battery pack.
It's warrantied for 80,000 miles or 100,000 miles. Do you really believe the battery pack will be reliable in five to ten years from today? Do you get the full, warrantied lifespan on the battery in your laptop ?
Do you think the batteries and other components in a Prius or Insight will actually still be running down the road, fully operational, in 20 years? I feel doubts.
Right now I'm driving a 19 year old Saab with 230,000 miles on it and it still averages 24 MPG combined and that's driving 70 mph with freeway traffic. I could get 32 MPG if I drove 50 mph but the SUVs and trucks would force me off the road.
Mature technology is often reliable than a new tech.
"AFAIK, this form of transportation is emmissionless."
Where do you think the power came from to compress the air ?
On the third hand, if you look at a list of countries we (or anyone else) buy oil from, you'll see quite a few who we don't neccessarily want to be flooding with hard currency. Perhaps it's worth some sacrifice (though not neccessarily $3000) to try reign in that cashflow.
Ha! You forgot that E = I/R. Nice try though.
In this house we obey the laws of thermodynamics. - Homer
What the heck ever happend to Fusion,
Politicians are currently deciding where to build ITER, the prototype reactor. Europe and Japan both want it. It costs 4.6x10E9 euros in parts and will take about 10 years to build. Running it for 20 years will cost about the same.
ITER will provide the knowledge for DEMO, the first model fusion reactor, to be operational 5 years after. Followed by commercial reactors.
According to this EFDA folder.
Why did GEAR crush RDP?
The funny thing about this is that gas is rarely the major cost per mile of any vehicle. This is especially true for new cars. This is even more true for high efficiency vehicles like the Prius. In terms of cost per mile for average drivers, gas costs for the Prius are going to be lower than financing costs, let alone insurance or depreciation costs. If you're doing this to save money you're doing it for the wrong reasons.
"Yeah, but..." is typically the first two words in a very bad argument. I won't make one of those messages. Your response, and the other one I looked at more closely, actually changed my mind on this. Well argued. Wish you weren't doing this as an AC, I'd mod you friend.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
Nuclear waste will last up to 100,000 years
"up to"
And besides, what anti-nukers don't seem to realize is that, the longer the half-life, the LESS radioactive it is!!
You're going to need an olympic-sized swimming pool and cooling pumps to store your nuke waste.
I = E/R. Otherwise resistors would increase current, not reduce it.
What is wrong with that? Nothing. A lot is good with it. You have taken thousands (more?) of hard-to-control, hard-to-verify emission points and replaced them with one single emission point. It is a lot easier to control the toxic emissions at a single power plant than it is for thousands of cars.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
Those who buy SUV's do it out of their own need. You might not need one, I might not need one, but they do. Speak for yourself only when you say "and you don't" need an SUV.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
Correction: "The NYT claims...". "Times" is in the name of a newspaper is NOT a plural.
"claim" is being used as a noun in that sentence, not a verb. It doesn't matter whether the claimant, "NYT" is plural or singular, because "claim" is the (singular) subject noun in the sentence.
Your correction is the type of mistake I'd expect from Microsoft Word's grammar checker.
The parent described in (albeit angry) detail his need for his SUV. He was angry because some know-it-all decided to run his life for him and declare that he did not need his SUV. Sure, he was loud, but the parent who set him off was the self-satisfied aggressive one.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
What educational system brought up someone who could spew out something so inane?
Constitutional rights may be respected, repealed, or modified; but they must never be ignored.
There's no such thing as a "deadman's switch" on a nuclear reactor; it needs cooling circulation for days even after a total shutdown. Most of TMIs problems happened after the reactor had been stopped. (BTW, the Chernobyl core exploded because they tried to instantly stop the reactor by hitting a switch after they had put it into a state where that couldn't be done.)
Look at what happened at Three Mile Island. Place suffers failure, and the safetys mean that there aren't any casualties.
That's only because the designers of the reactor finally got through to the clueless operators after nearly 24 hours and told them what to do.
TMI was within a couple of hours of a *total meltdown* before they finally figured out what was going on. It's not a given that the containment building would have stopped a liquid pool of molten nuclear fuel from eating through down to the water table.
You think you are going to be the king of the world producing your crop of super-speedy scaled mutant Olympic swimmers for quite some time to come. But they will catch up with you. Someday, geiger counters will be part of the doping tests. They'll catch up with you and your little black lagoon full of Deep Ones....
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
Oh, I didn't know that we Americans had solved the problem of human stupidity. That's great news.
There is no subsidy. Look up the word. It means "Monetary assistance granted by a government to a person or group in support of an enterprise regarded as being in the public interest." If you are TAKING less from someone in taxes, you are not giving them any grant or money.
Since when is letting someone keep their own money (and not forcibly taking it from them) a gift? A tax break can never be a subsidy.
"Who do you think lobbied for that tax break/subsidy? "
I wonder about the taxpayers. Perhaps they did: they benefit the most, as it robs them of less money.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
You know, I first read that as "Vin Diesel...." It actually makes some sense that way, too, if you are looking at it as a movie critic.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
Seems like a very good way to get a cover for a grow operation.
1. Get a prius, charge it every night, watch your electric bill spike.
When the cops stop by, point to your
electric car in the driveway, invite them in for a look around.
Nothing to see here officer.
2. Unplug the Prius and start growing.
Keep your electric bill constant
3. PROFIT!!
(4. Remember, the retirement plan sucks, find a new line of work after a season or two)
This isn't to make excuses for the Hummers and other such senseless cars out there, but it does help to explain the situation.
BTW, I have driven a Prius quite a bit as a family member owns one and I was impressed with its size. It is smaller than my Maxima, but not by much.
Lasers Controlled Games!
First, you are comparing an ash (nuclear waste) against a fuel (coal dust and carbon). Secondly, a bucket of coal and a bucket of nuclear fuel differ in available energy by roughly a factor of one million. Your question is poorly posed on two counts. A bucket of nuclear fuel comparable to a bucket of coal would weigh 1 millionth the amount of the coal bucket. So either bed would be safe to sleep in - though ironically both buckets would probably contain about the same amount of radioactive material: "Coal Combustion: Nuclear Resource or Danger"
You can't, because "environmental cost" is a subjective thing that will vary depending on who you talk to. In contrast, a buck's a buck. Even you tossed in a reference to imaginary human-impacted global warming in your list.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
Aha! "South Park" was right! The Canadians are up to no good - building reactors right under our very noses, what on earth could they need nuke power, what with all that hydro, gas and shale reserves? It's the Axis of Evils - Iran, N. Korea, and Canada!
Others ripped me a new one concerning my silly analogy in other messages. I'm not sure if they mentioned the ash vs fuel difference. I cannot take my posting back: looks like I will have to make my nuclear coal bed and lay in it.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
Er... V != E. Unless you mean E in that special sense, "electromotive force" (i.e. voltage of a battery, etc.). That's not to say E is unrelated to V, but still.
[100% ISO 646 Compliant]
SVM, ERGO MONSTRO.
Are you denying that nuclear waste is stored in pools of water? Sure, it can be done other ways, but the nuclear industry and W say it's too expensive. If you're going to store it in your house, a pool is the most cost-effective solution.
I think this is more a proof of concept than anything - yeah, it's not quite economical (though probably moreso in my state of arizona where there a significant number of solar houses in some areas, and gas just topped 2.33), but it is a true hybrid car, and it is in some ways a step towards less oil-dependence. If the day comes that the electricity produced is produced cleanly and in a great enough volume (the Hoover Dam just isn't big enough, and Nuclear Power as it stands provides plenty of energy relatively safely, but we're running out of places to put the toxic waste and scared of when something goes wrong), at least getting the cars to that point will be already out of the way. Hell, more true hybrid cars may even help push the drive for cleaner electricity.
The stupid ones are the ones who voted against him.
You mean you don't get enough of AC's just coming here? Astounding!
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
But with the KwH being used, does that really save all that much?
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
At this rate, China might as well start burning its own citizens for fuel instead and save the bother of sending the miners underground to die.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
The typical non-driving person pays plenty of taxes to pay for all of this. Also, paying taxes is not "paying your share to society": it is paying money to government. Nothing more, nothing less. Some of it might help society, but chances are a lot will go to merely enrich and empower the leaders. Ah! The Minister of Obfuscation needs a new limousine! Dip into the treasury!) If you want to "pay your share to society", you are probably better off giving money to a legitimate charity.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
How is this a subsidy? Who is giving SUV owners others' money?
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
Well, if the "oomph" of gas powered vehicles is the only thing we lose over the next twenty years- so be it.
I personally won't miss the "ooomph" of economic upheaval, resource wars, and/or lung cancer.
Yes, it's more economical to generate centrally. Otherwise we'd all have private petrol-run generators to power our homes.
Even better if you can get permission to use "off peak" (if they have that in your part of the world).
Starting up and shutting down coal-fired generators is quite expensive/uneconomical, so to reduce starts and stops you can have hot water, and perhaps heat banks, running "off peak"; the electric company can turn it on when it suits them to manage their load.
Further, some hydro schemes generate in peak times and pump the water back again off-peak; the losses involved are less than the cost of firing the coal plants up and down.
If you're going to carry power in batteries, you may as well plug them in when you can.
-- All your bass are below two Hz
Yeah! And CANDU reactors can be used to breed fuel for nuclear weapons!! (really)
So now we can pig out on power all night long!
But fuel cells would require a complete reinvention of the automobile, not to mention the nation's gas stations,
This gives the impression that we can get the hydrogen for free. At the moment we can't. We need more energy and non-renewable resources to get it than it's worth when reconverted back into energy in a fuel cell.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Only on slashdot does a post begining with "No smacknuts[sic]" and ending with "Go stuff it monkey fucker[sic]" get modded "Interesting..."
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Yup and you make a shineing example sir...
Honda did set up an experimental filling station for fuel cells run entirely by photocells
http://world.honda.com/news/2001/c010710.html
Diplomacy is the art of saying "Nice doggie" until you can find a rock. Will Rogers
[100% ISO 646 Compliant]
SVM, ERGO MONSTRO.
The smaller the penis, the larger the vehicle has to be.
-- Note: If you don't agree with me, don't bother replying. I won't read it.
DETROIT, April 1 .
says it all
Diplomacy is the art of saying "Nice doggie" until you can find a rock. Will Rogers
Otherwise fuel gets into your well and you don't know it.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
This is a US article - they have smaller gallons than you do .... you have to convert their MPG numbers to Imperial before comparing
They get tax breaks on the bigger trucks as they count as a business expense (I believe anything over 5000 lb is a commercial vehicle, so you get the tax break, but technically you aren't allowed on residencial streets) So you get the nice big truck for the same price as the nice medium sized truck.
:)
More truck for the buck, how could you refuse! it's like super-sizing it
We may not use gasoline heaters in our homes, but we definitely use natural gas. That is often far cheaper than using grid electric power.
A 1995 Pontiac Firebird Formula with a 5.7L engine can easily summon 30mpg as well on the highway. This is a 300hp V8 from 10 years ago, and it can muster as much mpg as your econobox, and have power and style galore. I wouldn't be proud touting those numbers if I were you.
If I were looking to get a real fuel economy car, your Protege wouldn't even show up on the radar. Something more like a Civic, or even a Geo Metro would stomp the Protege's wimpy numbers.
Why are there so *many* dipsh*ts like you on /. ? If you have solar or wind power you don't need to plug into the grid. But that probably escaped your 13 yr old skull just like the remnants of your grow operation from your bong.
Anyone remember what almost happened at Three Mile Island?
As soon as we get "good" (ie. as in more refined, like what is currently being sold in Europe) diesel in a few years, the whole "diesels pollute more" argument will become less and less important. Combine this with bio-diesel and bio-diesel blends, and you have a very hard-to-push argument.
What I'm saying is that diesels could very soon rival the efficiency of today's modern gasoline engine.
But I'm not ignoring the fact that diesels, because of their inherent design, only burn about 90% of the fuel that goes through the engine. (This situation is slowly improving.)
On a completely unrelated note, I remember a while back that a car company was saying that the air coming out of the car's tailpipe was cleaner than the air going into the engine's intake.
Is this true? Can someone please verify this statement?
IMO, this is entirely possible in Los Angeles, if that's where the test was conducted.
"What would make sense to me is mount some decent solar panels on a Prius, I haven't seen anyone do this yet."
:-) On the other hand, if you have a 40-mile round-trip commute, you gain more like 4MPG.
I looked into this a bit, and the math doesn't look good. You can probably fit a few hundred watts (maybe 2x 175W) worth of solar panels on the top of the Prius.
If your Prius is parked outside your office for 8 hours a day in full sunlight, that's a maximum of (8 hours * 350 watts) = 2.8 Kilowatt-hours. The actual energy production would be half that, at best (the sun isn't always directly overhead). So figure your solar production at 1.4 KWh per day.
Gasoline is about 36 KWh per gallon, so each day, you'd be saving 0.039 Gallons of gas, which would have cost you about 8 cents.
Keeping in mind that those solar panels cost nearly $1500, not including the custom battery charger you'd need for the Prius' high voltage battery, it really doesn't seem worth it.
If you live 5 miles away from work, like I do, that'd change your mileage from 60MPG to 78MPG. Actually, that's not too bad, if you ignore the startup costs
-Mark
You must not live in Nevada where the U.S. government wants to deposit that nuclear waste in a geologically unstable mountain less then 100 miles from Las Vegas. As for me, I'd rather have the coal then the nuclear waste in my back yard.
70s hot rodders knew the secret, why do you think they still drove their gas guzzling pony cars despite high gas prices (for the times)? Just jack up the rear end of the car. Since you're always driving downhill, this helps out on fuel consumption! SCHWEET!!!!!!
Hmmm, well I live in BC, Canada. The large majority of the power in this province comes from Hydroelectric, which (depending on the impact of the dams build) is generally more environmentally friendly than your coal etc.
You could find negetives to anything, and on slashdot it seems there will always be somebody to bitch the negetive about any option...
That's something that's always gotten me about "efficient" cars. Even if we did find a wondercar that would suit the needs of most people and get great milage/etc or use alternative/friendly fuels... there would still be the issues of legacy vehicles. How long until the new cars catch on so that the energy source is widely available... and also how long before the old fade out and we could get rid of the gas pumps...
I mean, even if all the new vehicles being sold suddenly works on grass clippings or whatever, there are still tons of cars out there running on gas. Not everyone could afford a new vehicle and would have to bite the bullet at the pump over time rather than being able to afford the lump sum of a new, more efficient vehicle.
With so many new technologies, you can't really pick any particular one and say it'll catch on. Electric has the advantage though that, if you *can* plug in, then yes we could beef our electric supply and the "pumps" as they were are already available. While electric is a newer thing for vehicles, it's still a well-asserted technology.
I wonder though... about vehicles such as big-rigs, aircraft, etc. Even as cars switch I think that alternative 'fuels' are needed to supply the power and storage capacity needed by the heavier-consuming vehicles.
I found a bug on your page: it says the slashdot discussion took place April 2, 2004.
:-)
Here in Sweden at least, it has been 2005 for a couple of months
Not to raise issue with the gist of what you said, but the whole "Nuclear waste lasts X years" is a big fallacy. The danger of nuclear waste falls off over time, but it will always have *some* radiation over the background level. The issue is simply "how dangerous is it?"
That's a tough question. There are multiple types of radiation and multiple types of exposure, and multiple factors in determining risk for each of those types of exposure.
The worst types of exposure are when the radioactive elements end up locked in your body (such as iodine, strontium, etc). When the quantities of the elements that stay in your body for long periods are essentially gone, the risk of the waste is greatly reduced. Alpha emitters are rarely a problem (U238, for example) unless consumed in significant quantity. Beta, gamma, and neutron emitters are worse.
Then, there is the issue of how you get exposed. Some things are at greatest risk of being kicked up as dust and inhaled. Others are at risk for being ingested from water, or locally grown plants. In the area around Chernobyl, for example, the radiation level is many times higher off of the roads than on the roads; rain has cleaned most material off the roads, but it has become locked up in the soil and plants nearby.
In short, there's no easy answer for how much risk there is after a given amount of time. The best you can do is "rough estimates". The "rough estimates" I've seen for Chernobyl, for example, range from 200 to 500 years. What about an accident at Yucca Mountain? Well, if someone set off an atomic bomb in there and blew everything into the atmosphere (once it is filled), the damage would make Chernobyl look like a transmission fluid leak by comparison. Chernobyl had one plant's worth of partially spent fuel; this is to be the completely spent fuel, of many cycles, from every plant in the US. On the other hand, if the accident is, say, slow leaching into the groundwater, it's hard to say exactly what the effects on people, if any, there would be. It all depends on the type of exposure.
You don't exist. Go away.
Well, wouldn't it be a combination?
If you've got a battery that can get you 30 miles on a charge... you can still get pretty far by going with mixed gas/battery power. If you plug it in, well you can go 30 miles...
If you plug it in, you get better "milage" as it were because you're depending on gas less to charge the battery, but you're limited to 30 miles range before you start hitting the ol' fossil fuel again
Now, if you get a better battery in the future that can get you, say 100 miles.... you could probably go farther or get better milage mixing gas/battery driving yes, or you could get excellent milage with a change+go strategy so long as your target is within the 100 mile range.
So really, your milage depends on 3 factors:
a) How far you need to go between charges
b) How far a battery charge will take you
c) Whether you mix 'n match battery/gas power, or just plug 'er in at stops.
"Not only are US nuclear reactors are significantly safer than Chernobyl could have even dreamt of being," There were papers in the seventies by US and european lobby groups praising the inheren safety features of the russian reactor designs to be able to install these cheaper models in the west. Of cours a few years later they say that they always knew the dangers of these types and that the western types are inherently safe. Both stories are told by the same people. You decide which one to believe. Ah and don't forget that between the fourties and the seventies the military told everybody that the radiation from the test sites is not dangerous. And the plutonium toxity experiments wiht humans of course never happend. "but the majority of fault with Chernobyl was because of human stupidy." And you don't have humans in the US. IIRC it was in 1975 that the electric cabling of a US reactor burned out completely because technicians checked the cabling with a lighter.
This is only cheap because there are very few cars running on electricity today. However, you have to look at the big picture.
Fact sheet:
1. The wolrd uses 82 million barrel of oil every day.
2. There are 42 gallons of oil in a barrel, about 30 out of 42 is used for fuel.
3. There are about 33kWh energy in a gallon of fuel.
4. There are about 700 million cars worldwide.
5. An electric engine can be (AFAIK) 3 times more efficient than an internal combustion engine.
So, we do the math.
30 gallons * 82 million barrels * 33kWh * 700 million cars / 3 (efficiency) = 1.8942 × 10^19 kWh
That's a lot of power. You have to build a lot of nuclear reactor, solar panel, wind mill, etc. to supply that power. Basically, we are using free energy now which won't be available in the future. The electric car for the masses is only a dream.
Government cannot make man richer, but it can make him poorer. - Ludwig von Mises
This is looking pretty workable to me - might make a good reason to get a Prius sooner rather than later.
Um, no. The Chernobyl people had turned off most of the safety equipment in order to conduct a test. The reactor was almost at zero power. They were pulling out control rods in an effort to start the reaction up. But they made a fundamental mistake with reactors. The control rods control rate of change, not the absolute power rating. So when the reaction did start up, it rapidly overloaded the reactor. On top of that, the reactor was designed with a positive thermal coefficient. English translation: the hotter it gets, the faster the reaction runs. No wonder the damn thing exploded. Its like Windows, when you see how well it was designed, its no wonder it gets hacked.
But this is old technology. Look at the more recent technologies like pebble reactors. They figured out the maximum temperature a reactor could hit, and then designed the ceramic shell to melt at a higher temperature. It can't melt under its own power. Its passive safety, which I trust a lot more than active safety with all its pumps and valves and moving parts that can fail.
TMI was within a couple of hours of a *total meltdown* before they finally figured out what was going on
According to the Kermey (sp?) report, the reactor actually melted down about 25-50%. The reactor designers were quite conservative. They assumed that steam would not cool the reactor core at all. In reality it cooled about half as effective as water. So in spite of the operators turning off the ECCS (emergency core cooling system) pumps, the absolute wrong thing to do, the reactor didn't completely melt down.
it's not a given that the containment building would have stopped a liquid pool of molten nuclear fuel from eating through down to the water table
Kermey report actually goes into that. TMI-2 had a relatively new reactor load, therefore had few waste products built up. It would not have penetrated the containment building. I think the doc even questions if it would eat through the reactor vessel. Its been years since I've read those docs, so memory fades a bit.
...that gets 100+ miles to the gallon. Sure, there are the arguments that if everyone drove tanks we'd still have problems - just that I'd rather have the fuel efficiency on something a bit closer to a normal size car. The task might take a while, but I wont mind having a large enough car on the road that wont get completely crushed by an errant 18-wheeler. Something along the lines of those two links in size, just favorably smaller than the first one.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
people always bravely claim how US reactors are safer and it could never happen. lets hope you are right. But don't forget that the original 9/11 plan included flying a plane into one of those reactors, and this could happen at any time.
You might be convinced that a reactor can withstand a 747 hitting it, but they reckoned the twin towers would cope too didnt they?
Its not worth the risk, especially with alternatives like wind, solar and *shock* energy efficiency (ask your european friends to explain the last one).
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Quote from the factsheet of CalCars: [quote] * Heavy lead-acid batteries add approx. 300 lb total, reducing mileage by approx. 5 mpg in standard HEV operation on city streets (because of acceleration losses), but by little or nothing at highway speeds (where wind resistance is the main factor). Lower internal resistance of future (lighter) battery packs is expected to increase the efficiency of standard HEV operation sufficiently to restore original standard HEV city mileage even when grid-charging energy is not involved [end quote] So the car is getting a lot heavier, slower acceleration (and longer distance to standstill), I loose a lot of the unmodified Toyota's additional load (app. 371kg). Any driving experience with a car like that? What would other battery types weigh?
Claiming US nuclear power plants are unsafe because of what happened in Chernobyl is foolish at best.
Hey don't think we can't see "24" outside the US. Now we know all about your nuclear security.
Fox corporation also opened my eyes about your muslim minority,
every one of them seem to be potential sui^H^H^Hhomicide bombers.
My main transport vehicle is a 60 foot transit bus as well. Except, mine is a hybrid using low sulfur diesel (hopefully with 5% biodiesel soon, but they are having problems getting the okay from the manufacturer) and I ride with a few dozen other people.
Interesting idea, but I'm not sure it would be worth it.
First, if you have all this extra capacity, it would be better to just have fewer batteries, reducing weight and saving money. Also, if you charge and discharge the batteries every day, they'll wear down a lot faster, increasing how often you need to replace them.
It could be possible, if there is a huge delta between peak and off-peak prices, but it seems you would need a really complex formula to determine it and it would still be slightly alchemistic.
The twin towers where designed for the impact of a Boeing 707 (the only reason they did so was because of the accident there was with the Empire State Building being hit by an aircraft). It was in no way designed for an aircraft impact of a modern size plane. Nuclear reactors ARE designed to be hit by things like a Boeing 747-400, Airbus A380, etc they will handle it, on the containment building that is , other structures on the terrain ofcourse are vulnerable, including possibly control buildings, but no nuclear reactor in the USA and 90% of those in the EU (excluding some of Russian design) will safely shutdown). Other then that there is also the issue that nuclear reactors have a large no-fly zone around them usually, which is enforced....
It would seem the easiest way to overcome the gyro problem with flywheels would be to have two of them, rotating in opposite directions around a common axis (shaft within a shaft perhaps). This still wouldn't solve the weight issue though.
Mal-2
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
haha cant wait till the oil runs out and
you big fat yanks have to walk everywhere!
From the article - "He gets 40 to 45 miles per gallon driving his normal Prius."
a tion.asp?pagetype=c2&style=&infoID=13
:)
I thought the Prius was supposed to be this wonderful fuel efficient car? Isn't that why the Hollywood types buy it to make themselves look eco friendly? My regular petrol engined Toyota Yaris does about 40mpg. Citreon do a diesel that does a quoted 68mpg on a combined extra-urban/urban cycle.
http://www.citroen.co.uk/level4/technicalSpecific
So much for the Prius' green image. Maybe it would get better millage if it didn't have to lug around all those batteries
OUR only nuclear bunker buster apparently can't get more than 3m deep into alaskan tundra, and self destructs if shot at hard rock, much less a reinforced bunker a kilometer deep.
The fact is, not making a decision on nuclear waste IS making a decision - to leave the waste sitting distributed throughout cooling ponds all over the country, building up continuously as they wait for the federal government to build them the containment vessel that was promised to them years ago.
People in Soviet Russia, however, appear to be afflicted with amusing juxtapositions of the aforementioned situation
Part of your argument is correct - the design of US power plants (or even more modern russian ones) is inherently safer than that of Chernobyl.
However, the second one seems strange. Human stupidity definetly was the major cause behind Chernobyl, but what protects US powerplants from the amount of human stupidity that is brewing in America (or for that matter, any other country)? If you read rapports about the human factor in controlling nuclear weapons, you'll see that there have been as many close calls in the US nuclear forces that there's been in the russian ones. There are incidents where somebody has played a training tape simulating a soviet attack on the computer systems of a radar station without other people knowing, who have then believed that a surprise soviet attack is really taking place.
Also, I recall that the three mile island incident also had to do with human stupidity, and in the end, any design fault is a human stupidity error.
You guys really trust in the absolute safety of our western modernized nuclear plants...
About 2 Months ago, the UK Atomic Energy Authority announced that 30 kg of plutonium were unaccounted for by the Sellafield nuclear plant, in the UK. Since 1952, the Sellafield plant has been releasing nuclear waste into the Irish Sea making it the most radioactive sea in the wold (yes, even beating the Baltic Sea).
Do you all believe that our governements are 100% committed to make population safety a priority against economic interests?
Do you really believe that a major nuclear accident will never occur in the western part of the world? How arrogant is this?...
The thing with nuclear energy is that one major incident is enough to devaste whole countries and kill millions of people.
No matter how low the probability of a nuclear accident (and it is higher than you think), it is not a matter of "if" but of "when".
The real issue is that there is no other way to make our planet healthier and safer but to cut down on our need for energy.
This article is about trying to make maximum use of a given amount of energy. In my mind that beats by far converting the use of fossile fuels to the use of nuclear energy.
We, western countries, like to tell that we produce energy in the most secure fashion in the world. But we do not like admitting that we are also the biggest polluters in the world.
Let's stop pretending we do so much better than others.The truly ugly side of this argument has not
been addressed. If the viability and cheap
availability of cold fusion technology should
happen tomorrow, and all coal and oil and nuclear
power plants were shut down the very next day,
the atmospheric pollution would start clearing
up right away. The coal and oil power plants
could be safely decommissioned, cut up, and sold
for the scrap metal. Nuclear power plants are
an entirely different issue -- the fuel (working
and spent), the core, and all of the primary
cooling system will have to be stored in casks
that can be guaranteed to be leak-proof for 10's
of thousands of years. The secondary cooling
system, turbines, buildings, and soil will have
to be placed in casks that can be guaranteed to
be leak-proof for only thousands of years.
No nuclear TCO study (AFAIK) has ever projected
manpower and technology costs for maintaining
these radioactive casks for the next thousand
years, let alone 10's of thousands of years.
Such an honest study would, in effect, shut down
all nuclear (barring military) programs world-
wide, because those costs cannot be reliably
calculated. Technological advances, let alone
manpower/robotics advances cannot be projected
reliably 100 years out, let alone 50 thousand.
Any attitude of "ignore the problem if you can't
calculate the solution" is the height of folly.
A modified Toyota Prius that can attain 180 MPG
of gasoline is a good short term solution. The
Bush administration's embrace of hydrogen technology
essentially equates to the widespread adoption
(long term) of nuclear power as its source --
any reliance upon fossil fuels/natural gas as
a hydrogen source is not sustainable. It would
be difficult to accept a new religion based upon
the GOP's "compassionate conservative" agenda
for a priesthood that monitors radioactive dumps
for the next 50 thousand years.
The electric component really screws up mpg calculations. If you spend 4 hours driving around the city, I'm sure all of these modified cars would quickly approach the normal 30-40mpg that we're used to in hybrid engines. However, you have to remember that long, sustained trips is not the way most people drive. I'd imagine most of my daily drives would be covered by a larger battery and plug-in charge.
At that point, I may only visit a gas station once a month (as mentioned in the article) instead of 4 times a month. That lowers my fuel costs from $120/month to $30/month. Then the question is "would my eletricity costs raise by $90/month?"
I doubt it.
Plus, they've been finding nuclear particles on beaches up to thirty miles from the Dounreay plant.
That is not how a hybrid car works. from How a Hybrid Works
Though the basic principles of hybrid operation are the same -- that is, an electric motor is used to assist a gasoline engine to reduce fuel consumption and emissions -- there are two types of hybrids.
The first type can propel itself using only the electric motor at very low speeds. The electric motor also has the ability to kick in and help out the gasoline engine when more power is needed, such as when passing or climbing a steep grade. The Toyota Prius and the Ford Escape Hybrid fall into this category.
The second type uses the electric motor only to assist the gasoline engine when it needs extra boost, again during brisk acceleration or when going up a hill. The Honda Insight and Civic Hybrid fall into the second category.
Therefore, unless you're driving really really slow or keep on accelerating or climb up a hill, which all three are bad for mileage, I don't see how u can get infinite mpg.
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An-gryyy..
ITER. ...er thanks CAPTAIN JARGON... you have saved the day!
DEMO.
EFDA.
Sure, it COULD be, but in most cases isn't. In fact, there's a pretty solid percentage of North America that still runs on coal, while is not as bad as it used to be but still pretty dirty.
Then address the actual problem, i.e. use less coal powered electricity stations.
Hydro, solar and to a lesser extent wind as well as of course nuclear are great options here.
As far as nuclear power goes, I wonder what's better, relying on oil or nuclear power?
Then you should probably hold off on expressing an opinion before you wade into the discussion. Any 10 year old should be able to tell you the answer to that is very clearly Nuclear.
If one persons electricity needs for their entire life time were met using electricity generated from a Nuclear power plant, the total amount of nuclear waste generated as a result would be approximately the size of a tennis ball.
You then simply collect large amounts of it together, encase it securely (in reality quite easy to do, large amount of concrete come in handy here) and dump it somewhere, e.g. in the sea. Given 3/4 of the planet's surface is water and it has valleys several miles deep, finding space to put isn't going to be a problem). If you think this is bad, consider that each of us in the western world uses more landfill space than this on a DAILY basis, and it's easy to see how trivial the problem of disposal of the tiny amount of waste generated is. The result is something that's completely inert too!
Let's take a long hard look at the safety aspect too...
The worst nuclear disaster in history was Chernobyl, which has killed 30 people.
The worst coal disaster in history (to my knowledge) was at Benxihu Colliery which killed over 1500 people.
Oil, as we know from very recent events, is also far more dangerous (as seen from events in Texas). The Piper Alpha disaster alone killed over 150 people (and that was in a supposedly well maintained modern Western environment).
Across the world, have been quite literally hundreds of coal and oil retrieval & power-plant related disasters in the last century, with tens of thousands of people killed. Gas and oil are inherently extremely dangerous to handle, coal mining especially so. Nuclear disasters make for far more sensationalist news though, so one disaster at a very poorly run nuclear power plant (which should never have been allowed to run, and wouldn't in any Western country) and so people who can't be bothered to do any research, decide that nuclear is 'bad'.
Nuclear power isn't the only answer, in particular it's not a great solution for unstable regions of the world (politically or geologically), but for Western regions, like North America and Europe it's far and away the best solution we have for a sustainable reliable energy source, that is by and large environmentally friendly to boot.
Unfortunately, the cars that are available everywhere else in the world are not available here. the government puts out a list of the most fuel efficient cars in the USA http://www.fueleconomy.gov/feg/bestworst.shtml As you can see, what you suggest is not an option for us. I guess we'll give a pass on the "stupid celebrities and americans" comment and chalk it up to those ignorant europeans who think they know all about the US because of what they saw on TV.
Sorry but it's completely ignorant to talk about people failing to follow procedure regarding the Chernobyl accident. To use terms like "stupidity" to describe the people involved is an insult, unless you are referring to the Soviet powers that were in which case it applies entirely.
Like everything else about the way things were done in the Soviet Union, the procedures weren't well defined and half of the plant's design was shrouded in secrecy. The workers in the plant were not told about the positive void coefficient characteristic which led directly to the accident, it was regarded as a military secret. They were improperly trained in the plant operation in general.
The international authority which investigated Chernobyl, AFAIK, revised the cause of the accident such that it was blamed on the design of the plant and the positive void coefficient, rather than the personnel operating it.
the reactor actually melted down about 25-50%.
Right, and it was on the way to a total meltdown before they finally went ahead and put some water in it.
Kermey report actually goes into that. TMI-2 had a relatively new reactor load, therefore had few waste products built up. It would not have penetrated the containment building.
Well, it's a good thing that always have nothing but fresh reactor fuel in all our nuclear plants. That should give us all a warm, fuzzy feeling.
Power plants don't have to be mobile. They don't have to be lightweight so they can accelerate. And they can have far more exhaust treatment equipment than your typical car. They're a lot more efficient, really. Also, it puts everything in place for a switch. If we get fusion or some other form of power working tomorrow, providing us with unlimited free electricity, the fleet of conventional cars will still be polluting and people won't be able to afford new ones for some years. Now granted that's not likely to happen, but improvements in energy efficiency can and do occur, and separate power grids in cars delay their takeup by about 10 years overall.
I am trolling
There is a conversation on the Straight Dope Message Boards about this topic. The conclusion was that even factoring in Chernobyl, nuclear power kills fewer people per megawatt-hour generated than coal does.
/ showthread.php?t=55605
Here is a coralized link:
http://boards.straightdope.com.nyud.net:8090/sdmb
My amazing wife - Artist, Author, Philosopher - Laurie M
The current 'hybrid' part of the Prius uses the energy recovered from the regenerative breaking feature. Essentially, this energy comes from the gasoline engine which generated the kinetic energy that the breaks are converting to heat and electricity. When you change the fuel from gasoline to electricity, the breaks will still recover some of that kinetic energy back as electricity. The kinetic energy is the same no matter how it was created.
You should compare the relative efficiencies of the gasoline engine to the efficiencies of the electric engine and the power source.
BTW: I know you don't 'create' energy. Is there a better way that I could have phrased the last sentence of the second paragraph?
Not at all. Just because you do not need one does not mean others do. It is really none of your business if someone else needs one. It is arrogance to think otherwise.
"if you need it so much, how the fuck did people survive before they existed?"
Using your arrogant "you should be able to run everyone's lives" logic, no one really needs to have to live outside of East Africa. After all, the first humans lived there just fine.
"and if it is so important to those people, why can't they pay the true price of such a machine instead"
They end up paying more than the true price of the machine because of the taxes that are added to the purchase price.
For the record, I do not own an SUV and am not likely to get one. However unlike you, I do not feel a need to force my lifestyle choices on others.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
The other respondents have changed my mind about the whole issue.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
The US labor laws encourage frequent strikes which greedy special interests shut down the entire transit system in order to try and get more money. We need reforms so this cannot happen. In the mean time, personal cars remain popular: you won't get a greedy union "worker" preventing you from using it to get to work.
Barring labor reforms, another reform might be to decentralize public transit systems, so a strike would only affect one small part and everyone would be able to easily work around it.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
enforced how?
you have missile batteries at every reactor? and i presume the cost of those missile defences are factored in to the electricity price when people brag about nuclear being cheap?
thought not...
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It should not be. National "defence" is one of those legitimate government expences.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
What is American or not? The Neon is built by a German car company in America. The Ford Focus is built by an American car company, but in Mexico. The Corolla is built by a Japanese company in the United States and Canada. Civics are built in 15 countries.
To answer the original question, the Chrysler division of Daimler-Benz has a legacy and tradition of poor quality, which has been kept.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
Do you mean to say "only large SUV"? Small ones like jeeps are not that much heavier than cars: and might in fact be lighter.
Also, how much more damage do the big ones cause compared to cars? If it is twice as much damage, then the SUV owner might very well already be paying for it: if it gets half the gas mileage of the car, the SUV owner is paying twice as much in taxes.
"If SUVs paid tax according to the damage they caused, it would be over $10 a gallon to fuel one."
You really need to look up what subsidy means. A subsidy is a cash grant. When the government robs you less, it is not a gift of money. It is your money in the first place. Not a single cent of money earned is a subsidy; a gift from someone else. Even if the government decided "no taxes on SUV owners", not a single cent would have been given to them in the form of a subsidy.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
It costs 4.6x10E9 euros in parts and will take about 10 years to build.
I don't mean to nitpick, but what's with the geeky obsession with writing big numbers in scientific notation? Can't you just say $46 billion euros and mean the same exact thing, without making everyone reading have to do decimal conversion in their head? It really smacks of elitism to me, and if you wrote it as $46B you'd even use less characters.
"When the president does it, that means it's not illegal." - Richard M. Nixon
Cut us some slack, man! It took is quite a while to learn not to post these numbers in hex or binary.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
did you ever play the game Myth: The Fallen Lords? if so, send me an e-mail at bullseye_1@@@yahoo.com.
Thanks,
-Bullseye
Radiation kills slowly (unless you get a high initial doze). Large numbers of babies in affected areas are born with birth defects or stillborn. Increases in cancer kill people of all age categories, and will do so for decades to come.
Well, you don't want to put it somewhere you cannot get at because what if in 20 years' time you discover your ceramic brick undergoes transmutation to a biologically toxic molecule? What if you find a better way to use/remove the waste?
Why argue over this? Instead...
www.theaircar.com
First, "billion" is ambiguous: in euorpe, it means a million million, while in the USA, it means a thousand million.
Second, it is not 46 thousand million, but 4.6 thousand million
according to research it would take over 8000 years for 1 millirem of radiation to reach any transportable ground water source if buried properly in yucca mountain. Seems just about as safe as launching it into space to me.
Well, if you are sleeping through it, it won't hurt, right?
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
History shows again and again how nature points out the folly of man.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
I think you are confusing this with a DeLorean running on power from Mr. Fusion.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
One filling station does not a solution make. Some people suggest that bio-diesel (recycled vegatable oil) would solve all our automotive fuel needs, ignoring the fact that there isn't enough vegatable oil existing to fuel even a tiny fraction of the diesel vehicles, let alone the cost of converting it and transporting to where it is needed, all of which uses conventional energy. It makes a few movie stars feel good about their Hummers, and nothing significant more.
The Honda hydrogen station is not presently economic. You could have figured this out for yourself when you realized there is only one of them. Maybe some day there will be economic solar hydrogen farms in the desert using existing natural gas lines and infrastructure, but we're not there yet, and won't be in the next several years at least.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
When will we see the show:
"PIMP MY PRIUS!"
'Check out - the massive batteries, chrome spinners, and super long extension cord!'
It would be helpful if we could stop arguing over which energy source is LESS BAD, and start looking for answers that aren't bad at all: http://www.newpath4.com/NNINDEX/nnindex.htm . This Earth planet is and always has been drowning in natural power. Deciding to pollute it straight to hell was a bad choice. Choosing to pollute it halfway to hell is a choice; it just isn't the best choice. We can get off of crude oil, fossil fuels, & nuclear, if we wanted to. We just don't want to. We aren't looking for THE answer, we like the tough, impossible answers. Sorry, I can't give you that. I have the simple, un-complicated answers. They are as realistic as this Planet Earth is realistic. It's just that simple. So, is it a toss up? No. The final answer we choose will be for the energy source that will work on deep space voyages, other planets, other galaxies, and THAT will determine which energy sources we should go with. Lugging nuclear reactors into outer space wouldn't quite work, so that rules out nuclear. Some people have mentioned mining the Moon for coal, but is that smart? Consuming our Moon and polluting the Milky Way as we go -just as we have polluted Planet Earth- well, that doesn't seem too bright for star trekkers or space travelers. It looks like we need a magnetic-electric drive. An engine that doesn't consume fuel because IT IS THE FUEL: http://www.newpath4.com/forsalespacecraftenginecon stantpowertheory.htm . I'm waiting, and the clock is ticking. http://www.newpath4.com/formulaeperpetual_perpetua ltimeperpetualspaceperpetualpowerperpetualmomentum perpetualmotion_3plus4equals5.gif . Nuclear kills, gasoline spills, coal is for moles; Author: Woodrow Riley . p.s. Yes, the Prius looks like a good step but... anyone want to ride it through Outer Space? I didn't think so.
The amount of radio active waste that one home would generate would be tiny. probably on the order of a few grams. The amount of pollution spewed by a coal plant in per home would be much larger if you include all the co2 and co.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
I absolutely agree, that comment was directed at the moronic AC that replied to you.
Most households probably have enough radioactive materials within 20 feet of their house to power it for a year... And you don't we don't exactly see that stuff going critical mass even in huge quantities that exist naturally.
I'm no nuclear physicist, but I doubt that even a cubic foot of uranium fission byproducts would be enough to cause considerable heat.
Constitutional rights may be respected, repealed, or modified; but they must never be ignored.
"I'm no nuclear physicist, but I doubt that even a cubic foot of uranium fission byproducts would be enough to cause considerable heat."
Oh yes it would. On cubic foot is a lot of uranium byproducts. If it was pu or u235 it would be many many critical masses. A cubic foot of uranium would probably power many thousands of homes for a few years.
The good thing about the waste that you get out of a reactor is that it is very compact. The sad thing is that it could also be greatly reduced with some of the new reactor designs. It is possible to use the neutron flux of a reactor to "burn" much of the waste we already have. Not to mention that reactors are the best way to dispose of the tons of enriched Uranium and Plutonium that we have sitting around.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
If everyone started using power during off-peak times (at night) wouldn't that become the new peak time?
Bet this
And it'll spew crap everywhere. Diesel is good for fuel economy, but horrible for emissions, especially particulates.
Go try find a diesel car in California. Won't find many, as they aren't sold there.
The Prius is amazing in its ability to minimize both fuel used AND emissions.
My dad has a VW Jetta with the Direct Injection Turbo diesel engine. He gets 50-55 mpg and can get that driving from Michigan to Quebec to see my brother. That is a total of 775 miles. He would use 15 gallons of diesel, if I did that with my diesel truck it would take 40 gallons.
:-)
I am willing to bet my life that your Toyota would use more gallons of gasoline to get to Canada than a TDI VW would...
Your Average Joe
It is also foolish to assume information cannot be biased. We have always been at war with Eurasia...
BZZZT. Wrong.
``No matter how low the probability of a nuclear accident (and it is higher than you think), it is not a matter of "if" but of "when". ''
That is absolutely the stupidest thing I've seen all day. And in this "bring on the idiots" thread no less.
If the probability is ZERO then WHEN is irrelevant because it WILL NEVER happen.
DUH.
Oh yes it would. On cubic foot is a lot of uranium byproducts. If it was pu or u235 it would be many many critical masses. A cubic foot of uranium would probably power many thousands of homes for a few years.
Yeah, you're right, that just goes to show my ignoracne of the issue (and also how big a cubic foot is) A cubic foot of u235 would weigh about 1200lbs, which is good for about 11 critical masses (according to a cursory googling)... That's quite alot.
A critical mass being about 157 cubic inches, roughly the size of a 5" cube... Still I have no idea how hot a pure cube of uranium about that size would be. I guess if I were interested enough I could find the decay constants and that that sort of stuff and work it out, but hey I'm too lazy. Of course, that's just uranium and not the byproducts, but there goes that lazy thing again.
Still, I know that most (at least 90%) of the stuff they want to bury is yellow cake material, mixed with the occasional piece of really hot stuff. What I'd be interested to know is why they don't actually use the reactors to produce more fuel from the U-238 that was basically just along the ride... I mean, they go through the effort of digging it up and extracting the few percentages of u-235 that they want, and the rest goes back into the earth. Seems pretty wasteful.
I'm guessing it's probably because of treaties or some such, what with the rest of the world upset at anyone creating plutonium. Agian, too lazy.
At any rate, I'd much rather have whatever byproducts of my consumption of electricity be of the nuclear sort, contained in a little box, rather than up in the air. That soot would be a bitch to dust off (not to mention all of the radioacive stuff that could be in the ash that isn't contained)
Constitutional rights may be respected, repealed, or modified; but they must never be ignored.
Note to self:
Having a point of view that isn't incredibly liberal makes me a bad person. People around here will downmod me as a "Troll" because I make such a statement.
Here's an idea, throw an academic paper my way that demonstrates that an electric vehicle, fueled by a diesel plant, is more environmentally friendly than my Camaro Z28.
Hmm.
:-)
I'm not sure if it's reasonable to yell "Arrogance!"
Nuclear power vs. fossil fuels is considered by many as a false dichotomy, including many who would agree with your suggestion that we should cut down on our need for energy.
Fossil fuels, unless one is of a radically unusual school of thought, are typically considered to be non-renewable. Thus, burning them at all is rather a waste, particularly with oil, which we could otherwise use for all those handy plastics. Additionally, fossil fuels mostly don't burn cleanly, producing all sorts of health hazards and whatnot. With this in mind, there is a case to be made for avoiding their use as far as possible. This is not about avoiding the fact that the West pollutes massively.
Now it is certainly the case that mindlessly promoting nuclear power is stupid, reckless and unacceptable. Although I'm not too sure about that link of yours, which seems a bit sensationalist to me: it's a bit old; american.edu, OK, but they seem to cite the Irish Times more than anything else, which is not quite authoritative; the 30kg is very probably a paper inequality and is, worryingly, in line with industry limits; Sellafield discharges have reduced recently due to improvements in the tech; it's actually the reprocessor, and not a reactor, that causes the discharges that have recently been considered most problematic (Tc-99 I believe)... so in this, Sellafield is not a typical example.
Sellafield has been around since 1952. In the 1950s UK, all sorts of things were considered fair game in government-funded science. Fortunately, things have changed. It is no longer considered acceptable to hide all sensitive information, partly a result of privatisation, one can essentially no longer get away with it (the Freedom of Information Act helped there, as you can see). Sure, in the 50s (all the way up to the 80s) you could get away with murder, particularly when it was classed as Defence. And I mean that literally. These days, there are incentives to check your ass on everything. Middle-management has hit hard and responsibility has become a worry.
Now I don't say that this necessarily means that nuclear reactors are safe. But we don't live in the 50s, either. If the Guardian can invoke the Freedom of Information act and investigate Sellafield, it is at least no longer valid to imagine that the public is kept in forced ignorance of their real danger.
It is entirely valid to concern ourselves with activities concerning nuclear power generation, and the various other methods too, and to use all the channels available to collect as much information as possible. There is, of course, no justification whatsoever to assume that the Chernobyl disaster was due to some fatal "sovietness" in its design and that no analogous accident could occur on a Western system. OTOH, there is no reason to assume that engineers are actually stupid or malicious enough to fail to build safeguards that they believe adequate. We may wish to see their numbers checked and rechecked, of course
It is a little unfair to assume that all the pro-nuclear posters here are simply working from BNFL propaganda cheatsheets. Nuclear power isn't perfect; Britain has accumulated enough radioactive waste to fill five Albert Halls. But there is a lot of alarmist nonsense spoken about it. Many related engineering problems have been solved, though certain remain extant, and today's technology barely resembles historical attempts. So I'd think the posters to which you refer are "frustrated" rather than "arrogant".
By its nature a flywheel is heavy and this additional mass also has to be accelerated. And the mechanic control would be difficult/dangerous. Batteries are there already, why not use them...
Of course ,however technologies do not spring forth full grown. We are in the baby steps stage of the hydrogen economy The internal combustion engine has had 100 years of development fuel cells have only been around about 30 years most of the time as a lab curosity H2 can also be cracked out of anhydrous Ammonia the waste product being a good fertilizer
Diplomacy is the art of saying "Nice doggie" until you can find a rock. Will Rogers
You might be convinced that a reactor can withstand a 747 hitting it, but they reckoned the twin towers would cope too didnt they?
Nope, the WTC towers were only engineered to specs expected to withstand the impact of a 707, the largest airplane in widespread use at the time they were designed.
Also, it's much easier to build something impact-proof that isn't 1000 feet tall. The Empire State building withstood a B-25 bomber crash in 1945 without serious structural damage-- planes are inherently a lot more fragile than buildings.
"We have to go forth and crush every world view that doesn't believe in tolerance and free speech." - David Brin
The energy probably came from coal or nuclear.
FYI:
2003 Electricity usage Billions of KWH 3848
Coal 53%
Nuclear 21%
Natural Gas 15%
Hydro 7%
Oil 3%
Other 1%
Source: http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/cabs/usa.html
Throwing nuclear waste into the ocean (even throwing it into the deepest, darkest part and in the biggest strongest container you can build) is not a good idea. You are essentially addressing the symptoms instead of the illness - and in a very poor way. What you've got with this thinking is analagous to what was going on (and still goes on) when the industrial revolution began - if we can't see it, it isn't there.
Smoke drifts away and disappears, therefore there are no long term effects. Wrong.
Throwing nuclear waste into the ocean is safe because it will be in a big strong container, and besides, if its at the bottom of the ocean then even if the container breaks we'll be safe. Wrong.
Leaving out the fact that we don't even know what is down there, let alone what place whatever is there has in the ecosystem, surely most sane people would concede that we don't want to make the same mistake with nuclear waste that we did with coal? I know very little about nuclear waste, but I do know that something which can be lethal for thousands of years is not something I want to throw into the one of the most crucial parts of the system that keeps me alive. The sun gives off a huge amount of energy - surely we can make more efficient solar cells? Underwater tidal power stations could also be useful? The point is that we need to consider renewable and CLEANER energy, not for our kids but for ourselves.
*cough*
Nice war games reference.
You have to also think about 3-mile island, which did not have very much (if any) nuclear release outside of the reactor, but it was caused by a combination of human error and poorly designed equipment. Before you go blaming human error on everything I suggest you read "Design of Everyday Things" .
> but in most cases isn't
(it isn't) != (it cannot be)
And this is THE point... not what you're doing wrong, but what you can do to improve your situation -- and at which pace!
If you're far behind but accelerating faster than the others you will undoubtly surpass them.
As was said, the Towers were designed to sustain a 707 hit (much smaller than a 747) that did not have a full fuel load.
The fact a fully loaded and fueled 747 hit the towers was not planned for, and the designers were surprised that they even stood for that long after impact.
Nuclear reactors are designed to sustain modern large aircraft, nuclear bomb blast waves (hence the dome) and the reactor itself exploding with several factors of safety to spare. Anti-nuclear 'what-if' sentiment made the reactors as tough as they should be, not like a bomb in a tin shed being tinkered with by idiots like Chernobyl was.
"30 lives were lost during the accident or within a few months after it. Figures from the Ukraine Radiological Institute suggest that over 2,500 deaths were caused by the Chernobyl accident."
http://www.chernobyl.co.uk/
". What I'd be interested to know is why they don't actually use the reactors to produce more fuel from the U-238 that was basically just along the ride..."
That is called a breeder reactor. There are a couple of good reasons why they do not do that.
1. You get Plutonium which is easy to chemically separate and make in to bombs.
2. We have TONS of weapons grade Uranium sitting around. You can dilute that to make many many tons of reactor grade uranium. It actually costs more to breed fuel than to "burn" what we already have.
Thorium is also a good candidate for a breeder reactor. It produces U 233 which would be much more difficult to enrich to weapons grade. Not to mention that there is a lot of Thorium around.
A cubic foot of spent fuel would generate a lot of heat and radiation. It would also be close to the amount of waste that a home would create is a few thousand years. Like I said think grams.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
I've been watching the technology of electric cars and solar cells for several years now. First, solar cells:
h .aspcost.
About 5 years ago I priced solar cells for my usage. The price I was paying per month averaged 7 cents per kWh (or maybe that was per Wh...I don't have my notes). When I priced solar cells then I calculated that I'd get a return on 10 100W solar cells (with average of 7 hours per day of Georgia sun) after 20 years. This means that staying at my rate of electric use at the same cost it would take me 20 years of using solar cells to pay them off and then from there on I'd have free energy.
I ran the numbers again last year. Solar cells were getting cheaper and electricity prices went up to 10 cents/kWh. The return on my investment was just under 15 years. (Georgia doesn't have electricity buyback btw). If I lived in California the payoff would be less than 5 years with the cash incentives and the high cost of electricity.
I figure I'll buy solar cells when it hits the 5-10 year payoff point. Things that contribute to that payoff are electricity price are higher electricity costs and lower solar cell prices.
At one point it'll be economically viable for anyone with a home to go solar. Replacing as many gas using products with electricity helps make more use of that 'free' energy after the payoff time. That's why I replaced my lawnmower with an electric lawnmower, bought an electric edger and have been looking at the viability of an electric car.
When looking at electric vehicles the biggest problem has been the batteries. Mainly dealing with distance. The old batteries used were lead-acid. They'd only provide around 30-40 miles at less than highway speeds. With the popularity of cell phones and laptops smaller and lighter batteries have made some major advances with NiMH and L-Ion batteries. Though the biggest trouble right now is cost the price will come down. There are electric cars out right now that can travel over 200 miles at highway speeds with high acceleration and 100+mph speeds. Though in the prototype stage the cost is not for the average consumer, but the technology is there.
But the largest drawback that the average Joe consumer has been the idea of plugging in their car for some reason. This is why the hybrid manufacturers are so paranoid about giving any indication that their hybrids might have some plug in possibility, their main message "You don't have to plug it in".
My largest concern has been that I'd have to have a gas vehicle along with my electric car for long distance drives. The average daily mileage is 45 miles, but at times Americans like to drive for long distances. With this plug in hybrid it says the first 60 miles are all electric, and from the article I read they didn't even use the L-ion batteries which would probably triple that distance. This car would be able to provide decent daily driving without gas with the backup factor of a gasoline engine that can be used for long trips.
Plus these are production vehicles. The electric cars I've looked at are prototypes made by small auto-makers who mainly create the cars using manual labor on a small scale creating a huge http://www.rsportscars.com/eng/cars/venturi_fetis
The plug-in hybrid has great potential and as the technology develops as new technology tends to do it will lead us down a road where the potential is a completely viable way for people to cut gasoline usage to a minimum and potentially use solar energy for their energy needs.
Is it necessarily here yet? Yes, for the early adoptors. Not yet for others. But this is a good direction.
... are less than 10%. Hardly "huge".
If you look at the per-mile cost of electricity (and battery depreciation), solar electricity is already about the same cost as gasoline. There's a tsunami about to take huge amounts of the world's fossil energy consumption and wash it away, leaving a very different landscape behind it. That tsunami may be solar, or cogeneration, or wind with cogeneration backup and conventional fuels for what remains; the dominoes haven't fallen yet.
Sustainability and energy independence essay
$2.309/gallon / (119,000 BTU/gallon / 3414 BTU/kWh ) /
Cost of a kWh at the wheels, from electricity: .9 charger efficiency / .9 battery efficiency / .9 controller efficiency / .9 motor efficiency = 15.2 cents.
$0.10/kWh /
Battery replacement depends a lot on the technology and how deep they're cycled; drain lead-acid to 80% discharge and you'll get a few hundred cycles out of them, or drain them to 22% and get thousands of cycles out of them. Toshiba's new miracle li-ion battery will apparently go 1000 cycles to very deep discharge and only lose 1% of its capacity.
Sustainability and energy independence essay
It's not only possible, it's been tested. Read some of these white papers if you don't believe me.
Sustainability and energy independence essay
One of the first things Bush II did upon getting into office was end the Clinton administration's PNGV (Partnership for a New Generation of Vehicles) program. PNGV was supposed to deliver a full-sized passenger sedan capable of getting 80 MPG by about 2001. It got close, but the last bits of efficiency required adiabatic (uncooled) diesel engines and the EPA lowered the NOx emissions limits to something that couldn't be met. On the other hand it would have been easy to throw in a gasoline engine and get 60 MPG, or go plug-in hybrid.
Plug-in hybrids are a huge threat to the oil industry. The electric utilities could cut them almost completely out of the energy business, and it was imperative that they prevent this from happening. So they bought a favor: Bush killed PNGV and started a hydrogen-vehicle program. This did two things:
If we had to wait for the government to do everything, we'd be at OPEC's mercy for the next two decades; fortunately, these CalCars folks are showing how it can be done differently, and there's very little that the oil lobbyists in Washington can do to prevent it. I expect that plug-in hybrids are going to be very big within 5 years, and hydrogen cars are going to slowly go the way of vaporware.
Sustainability and energy independence essay
My 2002 Prius came with an 8 year warrante on the Hybrid system (battery pack, and all the hybrid side of the powertrain). I will have it paid off 3 years before that coverage expires. So far I have had no trouble with the battery pack. As for replacement of it Toyota told me directly it's about 2K (this was back in 2002 when I bought it) and they said as production goes up and battery tech improves the price is likely to come down. Still they assure me that the warrante will cover me.
Well I've wrestled with reality for thirty five years doctor, and I'm happy to say I finally won out over it.
Ok stupid, The products don't need to be monitored for that time, that's the whole point of building the containers like that. Secondly, Cold Fusion is absolute BS. Why does everyone love cold fusion so much anyway? Whats wrong with regular fusion? Is it like the whole 'extreme sports' thing where regular just isn't good enough?