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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).
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
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
It's easy to drive downhill all the time. All you need is larger back tires.
... 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)...
and who do you propose pays for that electricty while you charge up your car?
Seriously though. I'm not trying to sound like I'm flaming you. I do think it would be great to just pull into your spot, attach the wire, and head in. But, ertainly someone has to foot the bill for such a system, which I think would be quite expensive not only to implement but to provide energy for.
So.. Who pays and how? Maybe coin op like parking meters?
Don't Tread on Me
65 - 100 miles per gallon is:
17.17 - 26.42 miles per litre,
27.63 - 42.51 km per litre,
3.619 - 2.352 litres per 100km, or about
LXXVIII - CXXI stadions per sester,
depending on what measuring system you like.
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.
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.
How much is a gallon of electricity going for these days?
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?
That's a beautiful theory, unfortunately not borne out in practice. A Prius engine is 37% efficient at its optimum operating point and better than 30% for almost its entire operating range.
A coal fired plant is typically 27% efficient, and there are distribution inefficiencies on top of that. (There are also distribution inefficiencies for gasoline, admittedly).
You need to examine what is known as 'well to wheel' efficiency to make a rational comparison, overall I think you'll find there is very little in it.
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.
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=
"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.
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.
Aha! So that explains why my Prius seems so perky today :-)
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.
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.
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)
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.
No. Every advanced driving course I have attended has pointed out that the tyre pressure recommended by the vehicle manufcaturer is significantly less than the optimum for cornering and braking (and for fuel economy, no doubt). Typically we'd put 4-10 psi more into a tyre than the placard.
So, you seem to be writing complete rubbish in an authoritative style.
Well, googling got me this:
"The energy content of a gallon of gasoline ranges from about 109,000 to 125,000 Btu. The average is about 114,000 Btu."
and this:
"1 kW = 3413 BTUs"
so, one gallon of gas (on average) = about 33kW
Electricity ranges from about 5 - 10 cents per kW, so a gallon of gas (more than $2) has as much energy as $1.65 - $3.30 of electricity.
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
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 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.
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!
i'm 6'5" and had a honda insight for a year (before i sold it to go carless); it has more legroom and headroom than a honda accord. this is because the seat is lower, and because it is a two seater. next excuse?
Wow. How then thousands die each year in cities like Toronto from smog? I guess their quiet deaths are not heard. Nothing spectacular like freaking out the uninformed about the dangers of "radiation".
Just because US has scaled up their submarine reactors to be used as energy producting reactors doesn't mean all reator types are that unsafe. CANDU (Canadian heavy water) and pebble-bed reactors are inherently safe. In the CANDU reactor, if the cooling fails and the pipes explode from too much pressure, the reaction stops. This is nothing designed by humans. It is part of physics of this type of nuclear reaction.
The amount of waste produced by a nuclear power plant is miniscule. The tons of crap we have are all good fuel that can be reused if it is reprocessed. But as of now it is cheaper to dig up Uranium from the ground.
A reactor can work for 5-7 years and the amount of actual waste produced will fit in a small bucket. And this waste is contained. With coal, it just spreads everywhere killing all of us, slowly.
Anyway, fusion reactors are around the corner (ie. they work now). All we need is will on the part of the governmnents to fund the development of the commercial fusion reactor.
...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.
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
Replace all instances of kW with kWh. kW are power (1 horsepower ~= .75 kW). kWh are units of energy (1 kWh = 3600 kJ ~= 3412 BTU).
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!
No one cares. Power is not priced based on how much of the original product that could have been turned into electricity was turned into electricity. It's based on, duh, how much it costs to make and get it to you.
In addition to cost, we should also look at 'pollution', which also is completely unrelated to efficiency, and isn't even scalar...it's a bunch of different things. Coal and nuclear result in total different byproducts that are handled in different ways.
And to further confuse the issue, some things don't pollute, like wind, solar, and hydroelectric, but they can have an effect on the nearby enviroment, by, for example, stopping fish movements. These effects tend to be extremely limited in range, but people need to know of them.
In additions, there are a relative dangers of different kinds of power productions. Coal mining accidents, for example.
In the real world, 'efficiency' is vaguely useful when you need to know the maximum amount of energy a new process can produce. That's about it. Gasoline engines might be more efficient than coal power plants, (I'm honestly confused as to why anyone would compare it just to coal, we're hydroelectric throughout most of Georgia.), but that doesn't have anything to do with anything.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
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.
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?
I hear this argument all the time. But what the people that say it fail to realize is that it is much easier to increase the efficiency and lower the pollutants of 1 large power plant, than to do the same to 1000s of mini power plants(cars).
And, indeed, if only economics (and not governments) were in play, gasoline should be much cheaper than it is now---it's not as bad in U.S., but in Europe and Asia, more than half the gasoline price is tax.
Nevertheless, this comparison shows... well, that the prices are nearly equal (with the order of magnitude) and there are no economic incentive or disincentive to use electricity on its own---only coupled with either environmental or political incentives.
[100% ISO 646 Compliant]
SVM, ERGO MONSTRO.
So, in the winter, use electricity to store heat in a heat sink, and in the day, charge up the vehicles.
In the summer, use electricity to cool down your heat sink (which now becomes a "cold sink"), and in the day you can still charge up the cars.
Or switch your heating and cooling to heat pumps.
There are always solutions. Especially when if you can find a way to make it profitable.
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
That's sort of misleading. Modern combustion engines are only about 20% efficient at best, most of the energy is lost as heat, so using electricity from the utility company would be roughly FIVE times cheaper.
Power plants are much much more efficient than an engine that has to fit into a car and run at a wide range of RPMs. So even with coal this is a much better alternative.
Toshiba's new nano-battery should make this an even more attractive technology. A quote:
"For example, the battery's advantages in size, weight and safety highly suit it for a role as an alternative power source for hybrid electric vehicles."
What if Digg added local news and a Slashdot inspired comment karma system? ---
http://houndwire.com
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!!!!!!
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.
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.
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
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.
Well, I think you are underplaying the impact of hydro. One study reported in new scientist looked at the environmental impact of flooding areas to provide electricity. The areas flooded upstream of the generators decompose underwater and release large amounts of methane, which is a far worse greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. This has not been factored into the "green" calculations for most hydro stations.
Not that I'm against removing our dependence on fossil fuels - the future of humanity will depend on it (its just a question of when).
But the alternatives have to be looked at closely. Much as the current green movement doesn't like it, nuclear power is one of the cleaner short term options for power until we get true large scale renewable power available.
My 2c
Michael
There is no cryptographic solution to the problem where the intended receiver and the attacker are the same entity.
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.
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.