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Ubiquitous Hydrogen Power Not Getting Any Closer
NewScientist has a story about the "hydrogen economy" that has been resting on the horizon for a decade or more. Despite a great deal of enthusiasm for and research into hydrogen-based power systems, the technology seems just as far away from everyday use as it's always been. A British startup, ITM Power, has recently claimed a breakthrough in lowering production costs by using a nickel catalyst (rather than platinum) with a membrane small enough for home use. But, even if their method is proven and adopted, it still wouldn't address huge energy efficiency problems in the process. "The point was made forcefully by Gary Kendall of the conservation group WWF in a recent report called Plugged In (PDF, pgs. 135-149). Kendall, a chemist who previously spent almost a decade working for ExxonMobil, highlights how the energy losses in the fuel chain - from electrolysis to compression of the hydrogen for use to inefficiencies in the fuel cell itself — mean that only 24 per cent of the energy used to make the fuel does any useful work on the road."
... is hydrogen an energy source or a way of storing energy?
Now oil prices are falling, bobody's interested. Till the next time.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I'd love to have an alternative - a real, no compromise one - for fuelling my activities without destroying the planet. Really.
But we ain't there yet. Not just because nothing - repeat nothing - comes remotely close to matching the energy density AND cost of fossil fuels. (And this after we've shipped the fuel halfway round the world).
No, the main problem is infrastucture. Be it public charging sockets for your Tesla or Chevy Volt, or H being available at your local gas (sic) station.
The only organisations with enough power - and money - to enable the promising technologies of the future to flourish is central Gov. As usual, they're doing nothing.
So how about it Pres Obama - ditch no-future subsidies for ethanol & Detroit, and use them to build nuclear powerstations (no CO2) and a nationwide H and elec infrastruture. Now that would be change I can believe in.
I'm not. Things died and got buried long ago (thousands to millions of years) for all that plant and animal matter to turn from living things into propane, oil, and what not. Quite a time investment, that.
This sig isn't original enough, it's time to come up with something witty...
I have a solution.
Clone dinosaurs. Bury them. Use the oil they turn into.
Cryogenic freezing in the meantime powered by the sun.
Over-seen by Skynet.
YAY.
--- ask me about nihilism, I will have nothing to tell you.
First of all, hydrogen isn't a power source, its a way of storing power, like a battery. Secondly, how can you say we "know" solar and wind work? Yes, they produce power, but the cost/benefit ratio isn't huge, not to mention the area needed to generate any real power. Finally, since when is nuclear new?
Sure it does. Most of the current hydrogen (in its raw form) is generated from hydrocarbons.
Not a typewriter
To imply that the process is somehow flawed because it consumes more energy overall than it produces is a trivial, straw man argument. The alternative would be a net positive energy, ie. perpetual motion/"free energy".
However, Kendall does imply the fact that the existing hydrogen production models consume hydrocarbons that are usable in the present form without additional processing. A hydrogen production method that does not use fossil fuels would be a boon. One that relies on fossil fuels serves only to perpetuate most of the present problems.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
If it didn't have >100% net efficiency, it wouldn't be used.
Not a typewriter
That's an important point but how come these issues are never brought up in discussions about the inefficiencies of conventional fuel? It takes energy to pump oil out of the ground, ship it to a refinery, distill it into gasoline, and transport the fuel to a gas station. With conventional internal combustion engines you get about 25% efficiency from the time you fill up at the gas station. Fuel cells get over twice that.
that converting chemical energy to heat, then to movement, then to electricity, then to hydrogen, then to electricity, then to movement might not be the be turning out to be such a great idea after all...
Deleted
It is not an energy source - it is an energy storage medium, little different than a battery.
The same as fossil fuels. The only "energy source" is the sun, that moves the wind and powers the waves and makes the plants grow and eventually turn into the mush we call petroleum, and nuclear energy which is finite in terms of ore and has its own refining/purification and infrastructure costs.
The smart bit is if you manage to find a way to harness a huge amount of a non-portable energy source - like sun in the desert or waves in the ocean - energy that is really available in excess, and use THAT energy to make smaller, PORTABLE forms of energy that lets us move about.
Either way our current society will end when petroleum becomes really scarce. There's no way we can maintain a world where everyone has a car. As you pointed out, the inefficiencies just won't allow it. Trains will be coming back in style in a BIG way, and there will HAVE to be changes to our town planning. History teaches us that probably quite a bit of people will have to die before we accept this as a society though.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
I think it depends somewhat on whether or not its diesel, but the thing is the infrastructure has already been paid for and optimized over decades by people who have become quite accustomed to the lifestyles made available by the profits it has reaped - and it has reaped great profits, and continues to do so regardless of whether hydrogen/solar/wind/fairies might one day prove to be overall more efficient and less environmentally harmful by a few percent.
When this infrastructure has made these people the most powerful forces in the power and transportation industry is it really any surprise that they're not jumping at the gun to throw it all out and start over from scratch with something newer and more experimental? Of course not, they're businessmen. They will squeeze this rock till every last drop of its black blood has been harvested because thats how to maximize profits.
The only way possible to stop this would be for some other industry force to rise up and take them on and be successful in competing with them at their own game. Do you see a handful of MIT students with solar-powered skateboards pulling that off? Personally I'm a big fan of sci-fi too but its just not gonna happen. :(
The "Hydrogen Economy" was partly the result of a stupid book by Jeremy Rifkin. Read it and note how little it says about where the hydrogen comes from. It was promoted by the Bush/Cheney crowd as a means for diverting attention from electric cars.
Using electricity to break water into hydrogen and oxygen, then liquefying the hydrogen, storing it as a liquid, then recombining it in a car (either in an engine or a fuel cell) is incredibly inefficient. The only advantage over batteries is that it looked like it might provide more range. Battery energy density has improved in the last decade, though. Battery cost is still a problem. But none of the hydrogen cars are cheap. Nor do they really have that much range. Arnold's hydrogen-powered Hummer only has a 60-mile range.
BMW actually built about 100 "hydrogen powered" cars. But they mostly run on gasoline; although they can optionally run on hydrogen, that's mostly for PR purposes. The liquid hydrogen tank has a "use it or lose it feature"; the BMW vehicle will evaporate all its hydrogen in about 10-12 days.
It looks like an idea whose time has passed.
ditch no-future subsidies for ethanol & Detroit
Unless I'm reading into this wrong, you're missing something...
For Obama's plan for the US to be the leader in alternative fuels we're going to need Detroit. He needs an auto industry that he can lay hands on and manipulate. Otherwise he's going to be relying on the goodwill of other auto makers to meet him half way to his goal and that's probably still going to involve subsidies. If these subsidies are going to exist either way I'd much rather have them here than abroad. By using resources in the US he will have some say and legislation will give him a hand to work with these assets.
We need to draw a line between the oil industry and the auto industry. As long as we treat them as the same we're never going to rise above the muck that keeps alternative fuels beached. It's a hard pill to swallow but it's still there regardless of our outlook on all of it.
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
I still don't get it. Why the insistence on a fuel source that needs new tech to store it effectively, transfer it to a vehicle, and to put it to use in a vehicle in the first place when we ALREADY have well established infrastructure for storage and distribution of methane and propane and conversion kits to run existing cars on it.
No new storage tank tech to avoid embrittlement and diffusion losses, etc. We even have fuel cells that can run on methane.
Geothermal and tidal sources are also energy sources besides the sun. Or, if you want to be really pendetic, there's no such thing as an energy source, since the sun/earth/moon/etc. all came about from energy that was already there, thus making the whole universe one big battery. But that's not very useful conceptualization of the universe.
Not a typewriter
I got all of those by doing a search here on /. Those are just some of the top ones too. These methods are to new to have become a fees-able opportunity so far; however, given a few years and another few gasoline panics (we all know they're coming), and they'll probably come around to being more standardized.
I have absolutely no understanding why you got modded insightful, considering that is the very last thing your post is.
Do you think there is one team of scientists and engineers who work on "alternative energy"? Such that if we go to research another source, 10 guys have to get pulled off solar power research -- thus diluting it? You do realize that these are wholly different areas, using totally different people, and funded by different organizations.
There is NOTHING to lose by researching new ideas. EVER. IN ANYTHING.
We're not building nuclear power stations for one simple reason: We don't know what to do with the waste byproduct yet. There are very few places on this planet that we can store it, and even then there's doubts. While I'm fairly certain that future generations will solve the problem of how to make it safe, that logic has not worked well for us in the past (hence the cause of any number of current social issues) so I will certainly respect if someone disagrees with my position here.
If you're that worried about CO2, use a scrubber to compress it into blocks and then bury it at the bottom of the ocean. Which is where most of the world's CO2 is anyway; Compressed at the bottom of the ocean. There's practical solutions that work on today's infrastructure that are being ignored because today's infrastructure is suddenly seen as eating children and devouring our precious [noun].
And why should the government be spending money replacing infrastructure just to pander to the latest political fashion statement -- ie, "green"? Whenever a slightly faster computer comes out, do all the old ones get swapped out right then and there? No. We hold on to things that are old and out of date because they still serve a useful function and because it costs less to maintain what we have than to use something new. It's great that research dollars are being poured into alternative energy, and I fully encourage it. And when the technology is proven, practical, and economical, I see no reason why we shouldn't then start migrating our infrastructure towards it. Which is indeed what is slowly happening as we speak.
Be patient. You're talking about over $16 trillion in infrastructure in this country alone. We only make a fourth that in GDP a year, and only a small fraction of that can go to upgrades.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
Briefly
Sun + Water = Fuel With catalysts created by an MIT chemist, sunlight can turn water into hydrogen. If the process can scale up, it could make solar power a dominant source of energy. Take a peak. http://www.technologyreview.com/energy/21536/
Gasoline is only 15% efficient.
Hydrogen required either fossil fuels or electrolysis of water. Fossil fuels will produce carbon dioxide. Electrolyisis of water requires a power plant Either that will produce pollutants or it could be better used to replace a power that produces pollutants.
Could a fuel cell be made that works with a different fuel - one that can be produced more ecologically.
Batteries heat up when you charge them. They heat up when you discharge them.
I suspect that there might be other forms of energy loss, too.
So if we took the same energy we were making hydrogen out of, and put it in a battery, then put the battery in a car and got miles out of it, in the same way we would with a fuel cell, how efficient are batteries compared to this?
Anyone know?
What about ultracapacitors? Are they more efficient than batteries?
Nuclear power is relatively mastered. Due to the wonderful world of politics, if you don't already have a nuclear reactor built there is very little chance of you ever being able to harness it. Hell, even Iran knows that nuclear power is the best bet. The only problem there is the byproducts of nuclear power are nuclear weapons and Israel really doesn't want that to happen considering they'd probably be the target.
The US' closest call was Three Mile Island and that whole thing was actually a success, the fail safes worked. The biggest disaster was Chernobyl which actually has vegetation reclaiming the area faster than anticipated(still not safe for human re-colonization). Some countries in Europe, namely France, have been using nuclear power without incident with great success. And no one likes the French, not even many French (btw: Thanks France! Without you the United States might not exist and my life would be vastly different) and if they can do it why can't we?!
So so far we have two "problems" that are solvable with technology we have TODAY but can't due to politics. As if there was any doubt who's best interests the politicians really looked after. In a perfect world, nuclear power would be rampant and there would be no energy crisis. In a perfect world, countries with excess food (such as the US) would be able to just export it to countries in need and everyone would get a fair share (rather than A) just the warlords or B) nobody because the country's leader doesn't want help while his people starve or C) because its not in the US' "best interest" to help those in need).
And mind you, if those 2 problems were solved a plethora of other issues ranging from (some) wars to pollution would be solved or a hairs' breath away from being solved. Then we just got to get used to people being able to have different ideas (fanatics/fundamentalists on all sides won't allow that) and different uniforms.
So, universal peace is obtainable but the odds make it impossible for all intents and purposes. I digressed a bit there, I apologize. But fixing the energy issue is very very important to the survival of the human race, and if we don't destroy ourselves first nuclear power is safest and cleanest way we have available in the long run.
HYDROGEN IS NOT A FUEL.
Not now, not ever, never.
WHY?
Because it takes more energy to MAKE hydrogen (i.e., snap the chemical bonds that embed it in various compounds) than you get out of burning it, EVEN AT !00% efficiency (which is impossible, of course.)
So, straight off, it's not a fuel. At best, it is an energy carrier.
TWO
IT SUCKS AS A CARRIER
A: Batteries and ultracapacitors are much better, and can be woven into the present infrastructure at a far lower cost.
B: There is no vessel on earth than can contain Hydrogen. It consists of a proton and an electron. Period. You cannot tighten the lid on a jar or whatever to contain it. It just leaks out. If it leaks out it either quickly bonds to something or it flies out of the atmosphere, gets ionised and then it's not even hydrogen - it's just an energetic proton. electronic bottles make the negative energy value of hydrogen as a fuel utterly farcical.
Therefore: HYDROGEN IS NOT A FUEL. IT IS NOT EVEN A GOOD IDEA FOR A CARRIER.
Those who seek "Business As Usual", i.e. the permanent continuance of the present energy glut circumstance are simply going to have to suck it up and deal with The Facts:
Petroleum is a limited resource that is either at or near peak or just recently past peak production. Its energy density and malleability are unparalleled - there is simply nothing like it. Hydrogen cannot substitute for it. We are simply going to have to re-order our society along the lines of the new reality. Don't like it? Tough shit. Those who resist will simply die off. Make plans or have them made for you.
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
Not necessarily. There has been small, tiny voices peeping for a long time that dinosaurs, or plants, for that matter, might not be the source of oil. Recently some bacteria were discovered which create hydrocarbons.
Conventional wisdom definitely supports you, but you might just turn out to be wrong, and then we'd have wasted money cloning dinosaurs, and time, by waiting millions of years for them to turn into oil.
But what the hell. Let's give it a try. It'll be cheaper than bailing out GM.
Exclellent movie, well worth watching. Really makes you want to see the big three go under rather then receive another big subsidy.
Hydrogen is very, very, small (in terms of it's molecular radius). It escapes through cracks that other gases don't. Storage vessels tend to develop leaks quite easily.
Ethanol works just fine when done right. Problem being, due to sugar tariffs, corn subsidies, Detroit not making effective engines, etc. it is pretty much deliberately being done wrong.
Doing it properly requires 2 things;
1. A proper feedstock. Corn sucks for this, period. Sugar cane or sugar beets are far, far better and can be grown domestically just fine.
2. Proper engines. Current flex-fuel vehicles pretty much just replace fuel line components with stainless steel (high concentrations of ethanol will dissolve many rubbers) and tinker with the engine timing, amount of fuel injected, etc. This results in highly non-optimal use of the fuel, as it maximizes the downside (lower energy density compared to gas) and doesn't take advantage of the upside (extreme resistance to knocking). Ethanol has an extremely high octane rating at about 114 (compare premium gas at 91). This allows you increase compression (and thus engine efficiency) significantly without the problem of knocking. To use ethanol properly, you need forced induction (supercharger/turbocharger) and lots of it. combine forced induction and ethanol and you can easily match fuel economy (miles per gallon) and get a nice boost in torque and horsepower (or allow for the use of a smaller engine with the same power/torque.)
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
Let's say it works. (I suspect it would, but I don't know.) Imagine the heat you're creating to accomplish that. How much of that heat would escape? That would be the most obvious measure of the process's inefficiency.
And I think another point here is that a lot of inefficiency comes from pushing the hydrogen, once you've made it, around in tubes which will leak a little. Tiny little molecule, hydrogen. Hard to keep from oozing out of things.
The upshot is that you might have a 10% better solution, there, but I don't think it's going to change the general bigness of the inefficiency number. (But it would be good to look at the inefficiency of other systems before assuming that the inefficiency of hydrogen is so terrible.)
It would take a number of decades and great expense to develop and deploy a national hydrogen infrastructure. For the same amount of money and in considerably less time we can promote more efficient building codes and other energy-efficiency initiatives, carbon capture and sequestration, non-fossil energy (hydrogen is an energy storage mechanism, not an energy source), plug-in hybrid or electric vehicles (where low carbon power plants are available), etc. Read Joe Romm's book. A hydrogen transportation infrastructure takes too long and costs too much, relative to the alternatives, to be useful in reducing fossil fuel use.
Specifically, from Natural Gas. Which mostly comes from Oil Wells. Which is what XOM is in in the business of finding and exploiting.
Fly me to the moon Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On jupiter and mars
From the people who brought you mail order polonium and other useful technologies such as portable butane bunsen burners, I proudly present http://www.switch2hydrogen.com/
It should be noted that research in this field has been stunted by politicians on the left and right side of the aisle, and that is the actual reason why hydrogen research has been as far out of reach as it has been.
When I can't even buy chemicals for my chemistry lab without the BATFE knocking on my door, don't expect scientists to come up with great leaps of technology. Of course, most of us backyard chemists got poor press thanks to the radioactive boyscout.
Educating people is the answer, not banning everything in sight.
---- Liquid was a patriot ----
This compressed into blocks and placing at the bottom of the ocean sounds interesting. Do you have any links to share?
How do you compress it into blocks? Are we talking about making dry ice, here?
What keeps it in block form, down there? Is the pressure so great that it stays as dry ice? Or do you really mean increase the ocean's CO2 levels throughout?
And the $16 trillion -- I'm asking, not attacking, I really want to know -- is that a replacement cost, or is that primarily realestate for gas stations which is a sunk cost? Is it the cost of putting in an electric car infrastructure or hydrogen or the cost of our current oil infrastructure? Does it include the cost of the cars?
It's always nice to see sources for the numbers we bandy about.
You compress it the same way dry ice is made. And what keeps it in a solid state is the intense pressure (not the temperature). Getting it to that depth, however, can't be done in bulk because there's no equipment to do so. It is feasible, however it's more economical to chemically bind the CO2 to something solid at room temperature, brick it, then throw it in a landfill, which is what they're doing now at some newer coal burning plants.
And the $16 trillion figure -- could not find a cite for it, sorry. Also, I goofed on the per year GDP generation -- it's about 14 trillion per year, not 4. Sorry, I missed a digit. The CIA world factbook has some general economic data; which is my usual source.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
We're not building nuclear power stations for one simple reason: We don't know what to do with the waste byproduct yet. There are very few places on this planet that we can store it, and even then there's doubts.
France seems to have a good handle on it. They generate almost 80% of their power from nuclear and reprocess the waste.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
You want an alternative that helps the environment but compromises nothing at all?
And also, I suppose, to still be able to eat whatever you want without losing weight?
And also, I suppose, to buy all the gadgets you want without having to face credit card bills afterwards?
I think the best way forwards would be for society to lose the attitude it's gained in the past fifty years that we can get what we want without paying the cost.
ditch no-future subsidies for ethanol & Detroit
Unless I'm reading into this wrong, you're missing something...
For Obama's plan for the US to be the leader in alternative fuels we're going to need Detroit. He needs an auto industry that he can lay hands on and manipulate. Otherwise he's going to be relying on the goodwill of other auto makers to meet him half way to his goal and that's probably still going to involve subsidies. If these subsidies are going to exist either way I'd much rather have them here than abroad. By using resources in the US he will have some say and legislation will give him a hand to work with these assets.
I'm european (from germany).
I am not saying that it is a smart idea for the US to ditch their native automakers.
However, I do believe that your reasoning that the US needs native automakers to convert to alternative fuels is wrong.
I have two historical cases that support this assumption:
1) Introduction of the catalytic converter
In the mid eighties, there were big discussions about the introduction of unleaded fuel and catalytic converters in Germany. The auto industry, the most important and influential industry in germany, then supplying almost half the worth of cars sold in europe, maintained that doom would be imminent if ;-)
legislation for catalytic converters and unleaded fuel were to be imposed. Technical hurdles would prevent conversion for a long time. Then the swiss government (no native auto industry) went ahead and imposed a ban on leaded fuel and mandated the use of catalytic converters anyway. To the utter astonishment of all the experts, all those fancy high-tech Benzes and Beemers didn't vanish overnight from swiss showrooms - they were available with catalytic converters as soon as the new legislation went in effect.
At the time, this hitherto believed-to-be-impossible conversion was credited to the exhaust pipe fairy
2) Speed limits
With just middle-school math and physics skills, it is easily shown that hitting the back end of a semi-trailer with your car at an 80mph speed differential may impact your health much more adversely than doing so at a 20mph speed differential.
Yet, the only country in europe where no speed limits are imposed on a majority of the highways happens to be the one that makes a living from peddling cars optimised for performance at 125+ mph - germany with its "autobahns".
So not having an incumbent auto-industry with 100+ years of valuable experience in power-lobbying might actually help making both environmentally and economically sound decisions ;-)
And another ad of how good smoking is by Marlboro
Geesh, are people really buying this junk science?
Go look up Humboldt State University, almost 10 years ago they had a very efficient and effective system of using solar energy to create Hydrogen cells and were driving cars around that took water and solar cells to produce ALL the energy for the car.
This is not 'rocket' science. Oh wait, the space shuttle uses hydrogen, weird I wonder why diesel isn't ALSO a better solution according to the gas companies?
Geesh...
In the short term we are talking about replacing the hydrocarbons of gasoline et al with the pure hydrogen burning in moving vehicles. How much energy it takes to create the hydrogen has to compare favourably with the life-cycle cost of creating and feeding batteries or capacitors including externalities such as polution.
Creating hydrogen by burning fossil fuels is completely missing the point - that of stopping the creation of carbon dioxide and other polutants.
Creating hydrogen from solar/wind/wave we don't care how inefficient it is in general as the point is to stop burning the fossil fuels - and the energy would end up in the environment anyway if we don't use it first to generate some electricity, then hydrogen. All we're doing is moving the resulting heat from where the wind/solar farm is to where the hydrogen is used - not much of a problem.
In the long term there is the opportunity to generate hydrogen fairly directly from atomic energy (as well as from the above sources) but this is feasable only in large quantities it seems (I may be wrong - the life-cycle diagram I recall seeing was over a year ago) - and it would be necessary to create pipelines for the fuel to be distributed. The idea was that the super-cool pipes could also be used to cool super-conducting wires so we got the benefit of more efficient electricity distribution too.
But we need a hydrogen-using infrastructure to justify the creation of the hydrogen supply infrastructure - so use of current generation schemes is one way to kick-start the process.
Note I am not generally in favour of the hydrogen society at this point (far more hazerdous than gas is for example) but can see that it might be one way to go if nobody invents something like the "shipstone" of Science Fiction fame (100% efficient and huge capacity static energy storage container) which bears more than a passing resemblance to a very good capacitor.
The paranoia comes in when we talk about atomic power. IMHO without atomic power it is silly to talk of hydrogen use on any scale.
Been there, done that, paid for the T-shirt
and didn't get it
They just change the electrolyte. It suffers from all the problems batteries do, they always will.
Furthermore, hydrogen is never found in nature in a purely oxidizable state. The closest thing is natural gas, which is where 90% of hydrogen used for industrial purposes comes from. Using electricity for electrolysis results in 50% loss of energy to heat.
nothing is real
I assume you're rejecting the solution presently used by the fossil fuel industry, which is just to dump it directly into the environment at the point of generation, right?
'cause if that's on the table, well, problem solved.
But if you, quite reasonably, reject this solution then it shouldn't be permissible for the fossil fuel industry either. So comparing apples to apples we see that nuclear power is much better off.
--MarkusQ
You need to do some reading on fast breeder reactors. The waste problem was solved years ago - the issue now is one of political will. Your nuclear knowledge sounds like the "common wisdom" sort of thing, not something based on fact.
The only scheme I've ever heard of for storing CO2 in the ocean is to pump it beneath the ocean floor. There is not enough pressure to keep it in a solid state. Instead, it becomes a liquid:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/5255444.stm
Can you point to evidence that shows otherwise?
methanol.
Take your hydrogen and make methanol. You can even get the carbon from CO2 in the air if you like. Then use the usual liquid fuel transport system, although you will have to change out some gaskets and hoses.
If you don't like methanol, use that as the feed stock to make ethanol or butanol.
By the way, the chemical you need to extract CO2 from the air is monoethanolamine. Very old technology.
The limiting factor is all the renewable energy you will need to run the electrolysis cells, CO2 scrubbers, and reformers to basically reverse the combustion reaction. If we had decent batteries it would not be worth it, but it's hard to beat a liquid hydrocarbon fuel for energy density.
I work with hydrogen at chemical plant. It's not fun. It requires continuous painstaking maintenance, and it still gets loose. Put it into a million cars racing around the highways? Forget it.
We're not building nuclear power stations for one simple reason: We don't know what to do with the waste byproduct yet.
Arguably speaking, the nuclear waste is a whole heck of a lot easier because we're talking about a dozen or so orders magnitude less of it vs the amount of CO2 we produce any given year. Of course, I'm one of the ones that believes the problem is mostly political - the stuff remaining after reprocessing or running it through a breeder reactor lasts a lot less time. France has been reprocessing for years. And no, I don't buy any proliferation concerns - if anything all that waste sitting around increases concerns.
And when you're talking a couple thousand tons of high pressure or solid CO2, the hazards aren't any less - any leak can quickly displace the oxygen in the area and asphyxiate anybody/thing nearby.
I don't read AC A human right
Not so much. Yes, reprocessing reduces it somewhat - but creates plutonium factories, great terrorist targets and a huge security problem if we want to find a solution that's globally applicable. And reprocessing produces pollution itself, and doesn't eliminate all the waste. France's "solution" has been the same as the U.S.'s: stick your head in the sand.
Some of the wast they ship to Russia. A lot of it lies around in short-term storage, big barrels or holding tanks, and everybody prays for no leaks. They've designated the town of Bure as their main nuclear waste dump, like the U.S. has designated Yucca Mountain, but are getting the same sort of push-back about it.
Uranium or plutonium fission is a highly sub-optimal energy source. Much better to put resources into developing accelerator-based "energy amplifier" reactors that are subcritical, can burn up nuclear waste, and run on thorium, and also of course fusion, including making better use of that big fusion reactor just 93 million miles away.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
It is feasible, however it's more economical to chemically bind the CO2 to something solid at room temperature, brick it, then throw it in a landfill, which is what they're doing now at some newer coal burning plants.
Do you happen to have a source on this? I'm unaware of any major coal plants that are performing sequestration at this time.
Anyways - the problem with this method is 'what do you use to absorb the CO2?', the production of most substances that do this involve the release of CO2. Things not being perfect, that doesn't generally work out.
Mining and such are also generally CO2 intense activities.
I don't mind being green - but I get a bit irked at some of the stupidity - many 'green' initiatives aren't so green under the surface.
I don't read AC A human right
Nuclear power is relatively mastered. Due to the wonderful world of politics, if you don't already have a nuclear reactor built there is very little chance of you ever being able to harness it. Hell, even Iran knows that nuclear power is the best bet. The only problem there is the byproducts of nuclear power are nuclear weapons and Israel really doesn't want that to happen considering they'd probably be the target. I'll believe that when we have Nuclear fusion in another 40 years.
Ford actually produced 2 cars called Model A.
1903 Ford Model A
engine: Flat-2
mpg: ???
mileage is not listed in wikipedia, but the motor is only a two cylinder, 8hp, it had skinny tires(low rolling resistance) and top speed was 45mph so It would probably get pretty darned good gas mileage on the paved roads we have today.
1923 Ford Model A
engine: L-head-4
mpg: 25-30
Modern ICEs are more efficient in terms of producing horsepower, and today's cars are generally heavier so they do more work per mile, but they haven't improved mpg much at all.
We have the best government that money can buy.
It takes as much energy to remove CO2 from the atmosphere as you get from burning the fossil fuels it came from.
The only problem there is the byproducts of nuclear power are nuclear weapons and Israel really doesn't want that to happen considering they'd probably be the target.
Incorrect. There are ways to run nuclear power plants without generating weapons material just as there are ways to make weapons grade material today without involving power plants.
So so far we have two "problems" that are solvable with technology we have TODAY but can't due to politics.
Agree with you here, and pretty much the rest of your post as well. The problems we have with starvation aren't industrial food production, and it isn't even transport, it's political.
I don't read AC A human right
It all sounds good until you realise that 99% of all vehicles, including commercial transports, tools, lawnmowers, everything is using liquid based engines.
Now do the math, whats required for a 50% switch over? Calculate the energy required to build one engine + metals required.
If to swap 1% of all engines yearly requires 50% of all metal sources like zinc/silver/platinum etc... That will then cause a spike in demand, and a higher price rise.
Then calculate how many factories you need, is it 3 or 500 ? ok now, try and buy them... oh that requires 200billion$, now battle local unions, or environmentalists or how to get the materials to your factories, now if you factory requires 5megawatts to run, you have to find out if the local supplier can actually give it to you.
So 400m cars, = 4m yearly, good luck finding customers willing to part with 80 billion dollars.
No one is going to replace a good car today, only bad old cars, but people with bad old cars have no money.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
nothing - repeat nothing - comes remotely close to matching the energy density AND cost of fossil fuels.
Short term costs, yeah. But the long term costs are potentially very expensive.
i wish i could stop
USA is not building nuke plants because not a single local govt will ALLOW it with permits, the idiots delay delay sue etc... it can drag out the planning 10-15 years, so they dont both.
And USA companies do MAKE nuclear rectors for european countries. So they KNOW how to make and store the waste, which btw is MINIMAL. The waste is not 1000s of tonnes a years, the waste is tiny.
And its only called waste because we only used 1% of the energy, and we wont re-process it. It still can be used after reprocessing so its not really waste, its stored so we can in the future reprocess it cleaner.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
Do you happen to have a source on this? I'm unaware of any major coal plants that are performing sequestration at this time.
here. It's technology that's currently being piloted. You are correct that there are no base load power stations currently doing this.
what do you use to absorb the CO2?', the production of most substances that do this involve the release of CO2.
Hell if I know... Most people don't care enough about the full industrial cycle to document that. They just care about "CO2". I doubt these people would see a problem in releasing CO instead, because that would "solve half the problem". :\
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
No new technology will come close to the 90% efficiency that is provided by current battery technologies. The batteries that power your cell phone are good enough and more efficient than any emerging technology.
Hydrogen doesn't occur naturally and any process that can be used to create hydrogen can be used to create electricity more efficiently.
Electricity:
90% efficient storage
existing distribution grid
domestic production
renewable sources
Hydrogen:
low efficiency, very very expensive fuel cells
hard to store, transport
low energy density
Oil companies and the Bush Admin like to talk about hydrogen power because it make them look like they give a shit about the environment and they can hand out government money without affecting the current power structures. They don't like to talk about where the hydrogen will come from - reformulated natural gas which leaves the Exxon in control.
We have the best government that money can buy.
Kendall is apparently one of the few people who can analyze chemical energy storage systems rationally; the sorry truth is that hydrogen GAS - its default phase at the surface of this planet - is one of the least energy-dense materials we have. It's complete lunacy to think it can ever be EFFICIENTLY used as a fuel or source of stored energy.
What Kendall said of the "hydrogen economy" is also sadly true of virtually every other form of stored chemical energy we have or can envision: it takes more energy to create the stored form than can be recovered later as useful work. That is just my own restatement of what Kendall said. This is true of petroleum (though Mother Nature paid down the energy cost for us over millions of years), biodiesel, hydrogen as a fuel, batteries, and all the rest. Solar, wind, geothermal, hydro, and tidal generation are different, since they are not STORED chemical forms of energy, though even they are heavily dependent upon at least one form in order to be fully useful (to modern human society).
From where does the energy come to create the stored chemical fuels in the first place? We might possibly use solar, wind, geothermal, hydro, and tidal systems, but if the creation is significantly dependent upon the use of the very fuels created then it's a losing game of slow energy starvation.
If that's going to be the case, then we'd best just start getting comfy with having and using a LOT less energy than we do now: no more street lights, no neon signs, no more endless numbers of "wall warts" sipping power 24/7, no stadiums lit up bright as day in the dead of night, no more computer screens running screensavers every idle minute, no more "security" lights appeasing fears, no more giant metal birds shooting across the sky... and no more two hour commutes in Lincoln Navigators or Hummers.
I've been suggesting for some time that the "petroleum age" has been an energy anomaly, and one that we have not exploited wisely; we still don't have a sustainable presence in space or on another planet, for instance. Once the petroleum runs truly scarce, we will no longer even have the means to establish that sustainable presence; the heavy industry necessary to accomplish it is utterly dependent upon limitless supplies of petroleum.
Wanna know the real reason why we haven't been visited by ET? Poor little ET's species wasn't any more disciplined than we have been, they had their own Peak Oil event on their planet, and got trapped on their little rock for lack of energy to finish the exodus.
I read a few pages of the pdf report. They're more interested in nitpicking, making rhetorical points, and attacking oil companies than providing good best-estimate analysis.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
The volume (and mass) of waste per kilowatt hour of power is orders of magnitude lower for nuclear than for fossil fuels.
Yes, but nobody's going to die from inhaling an equivalent mass of CO2 versus, say, a radioactive isotope of cesium. And if somebody releases a thousand pounds of CO2 over a populated city, I doubt anyone would notice... A thousand pounds of any radioactive compound and you're talking major ecological disaster. (and yes, everything is radioactive, for those in the peanut gallery... you know what we're talking about here though)
The bulk of nuclear wastes can be cost effectively reprocessed to make more fuel,
The bulk of nuclear fuel can only be reprocessed if and only if the plant was designed with that in mind. Most currently in production aren't breeder plants because they can be used for weapons programs. To say it in laymans terms... They've been neutered. They break the uranium down into isotopes that don't necessarily lend themselves to reprocessing in several common configurations. As well, breeder reactors are more expensive to operate.
Much of the remaining nuclear waste material has a short half-life
Much of it does, but enough of it doesn't and the stuff that doesn't lasts millions of years.
The remainder of the nuclear waste material is long-half life solids which, due to the very nature of half lives, aren't very radioactive
...and when you pack enough of it into a confined area, which is what we're doing when we store it... It's still lethal. The Chernobyl disaster area is covered in these "not very" radioactive isotopes. Do you want to live there?
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
And why exactly are you comparing two, outdated technologies when you really should be comparing them to solar thermal, photovoltaic, wind, hydro, tidal and geothermal?
It's because rusted on nuclear proponents are still living in the 70's and honestly believing that nuclear is so good compared to coal, but they can never win the debate against renewables.
I have not yet seen someone mentioning it, so I might just report the concept of well-to-wheel efficiency, i.e. the efficiency from extraction until consumption in a vehicle. IIRC That's about 10% for the oil-to-gasoline cycle. That makes hydrogen a 140% improvement over current situation, and that's according to a critic.
Victims of 9/11: <3000. Traffic in the US: >30,000/y
Another reason why governments don't want to push for electric vehicles is that you can not tax them. People will charge at home so the only option is to place a tax on all electricity - people would revolt. Hydrogen maintains the current structure for fuel / road taxes. Governments like this because it is a significant source of income (especially here in Canada). So even if electric vehicles are better, governments will still support building an expensive hydrogen infrastructure.
And fyi, with a little more progress made on the supercapacitor front, there will be no question that purely electric vehicles are "technically" the way to go.
Gasoline engines get only an average of 25-30% efficiency out of the gasoline we fill them with. And it costs a lot of energy to make that gasoline from oil, and to get it out of the ground as oil. So if hydrogen's overall efficiency is 24%, then it's better than gasoline's. And that's without the scale economy gasoline has. So bringing hydrogen up to gasoline's scale is worth expending the extra efficiency from hydrogen to get there.
Unless there's something even more efficient than hydrogen, in which case we should use that. But gasoline isn't it. So we shouldn't be using gasoline: either hydrogen, or whatever's better than both gasoline or hydrogen.
--
make install -not war
We need to draw a line between the oil industry and the auto industry. As long as we treat them as the same we're never going to rise above the muck that keeps alternative fuels beached.
Actually, we need to MAKE a line between the oil and auto industries. Do you honestly believe that one could exist without the support of the other in their present situations? And the subsidies? Do you reward your kids for making F's in school? They shouldn't receive subsidies, they should be PURCHASED and new management installed. Old management should be blacklisted. (Yes, blacklisting does happen).
When you want something built, come see me. If you want correct grammar and spelling, get a F*ing liberal arts student.
The reason why we are on oil is because energy companies and gov wave the majic wand and show you different tech. So where is the problem? FEW OF THESE CAN WORK. Hydrogen is really one of them. H2 is pretty much stripped from NG. IOW, if you are burning Hydrogen, you would convert CNG to hydrogen, have to ship it (pipe will not work), have to store it on the ground as well as in the vehicle(very pricey or very low density), then you either burn it or convert to electricity. The problem is that not only do we have a partial infrastructure for CNG (with none for hydrogen), but it is a direct conversion. IOW, we are better off with CNG rather than Hydrogen.
BUT, this will still leave us dependant on foreign CNG. Why? Because if we converted ALL OF OUR CARS TODAY TO CNG, WE HAVE LESS THAN 10 years worth, based on KNOWN AND EXPECTED RESERVES. CNG will NOT go far for us.
Realistically, the ONLY choice is to move to batteries or capacitors. We have close to the remaining tech in place to handle it (the grid needs some work, but overall minimal compare to full CNG or even a partial hydrogen). More importantly, electrical is not only more efficient, but it allows us to use any number of producers; Atomic, Coal, Wind, Solar, Geo-thermal, CNG, OIL, etc.
Yet, ppl like you do not think.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
This guy seems to disagree with the greatness of reprocessing. http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=rethinking-nuclear-fuel-recycling
I'd love to have a tank of hydrogen leaking slowly in a garage for a while. Just leave my good old hydrogen powered convertible in the garage all winter to whip it out again in the summer when it warms up a bit. Now I don't know the leakage rates here, but as it's been said, it's awfully hard to contain those tiny molecules of hydrogen. After 6 months of sitting in a closed garage, am I even gonna be able to drive the thing to get it refilled? It's not like I can just add some fuel stabilizer and call it a day. Not to mention what happens with a room slowly filling with an explosive gas.
Nobody's going to die from inhalation of CO2, but many people are going to die from hunger, draughts, hurricaines once the climate changes due to high levels of CO2.
Also, you DON'T need breeder reactors to reprocess fuel. Your current nuclear waste can be reprocessed just fine.
Look at Germany and France. Germany tries to build renewable energy infrastructure.
France has already built essentially all-nuclear electrical grid.
Currently price of electricity is 2.5x lower in France than in Germany.
So stop comparing your outdated brain-dead USA nuclear industry and real efficient country-wide solution.
No, the main problem is infrastucture. Be it public charging sockets for your Tesla or Chevy Volt, or H being available at your local gas (sic) station.
Those of us who actually drive electrics realize pretty quickly that infrastructure is only perceived as a problem. Electricity is already everywhere, but the reality is that several standard deviations of your charging is done at home.
Don't have a garage, or need to take long trips? That sucks for you, but statistics rather unassailably demonstrate that's not a problem for the other 80 or 90 percent of us. Electrics aren't going to be a 100% solution, but a 90% solution is well within our reach.
Not a one of these have changed a thing. Hydrogen is still a bad choice.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
There's no rule that says there has to be an answer to every problem.
Maybe the only sustainable solution is that we can't all drive cars?
(Not that I'm saying I necessarily agree with this, just that when someone offers no viable alternative, maybe it's because they believe there isn't one.)
Karma: pi (Mostly due to circular reasoning in posts).
Why is it we keep hearing about hydrogen as a power source? It makes (almost) as much sense to talk about running our cars on pure water.
It's simple: you can't get more energy from a material than you put into it - in fact, you will get less due to entropy, period. Hydrogen has less potential energy than gasoline, per molecule. Using it in cars, in an ICE, will require substantially more hydrogen than gas (which is a significant problem due to the storage limitations of hydrogen).
Thinking that hydrogen will eventually replace gasoline in ICEs is foolhardy at best; you're basically saying you believe in perpetual motion. Indeed, producing hydrogen from fossil fuels is one of, if not the, most ecologically irresponsible policies I can think of due to the conversion loss. Especially when it's coal.
Realistically, there are maybe only three technical possibilities for 'gasoline replacement' using materials we're aware of today:
1) miniaturized nuclear reactors in vehicles. For a myriad of reasons, this is not going to happen.
2) A new, higher-density, longer-lifespan storage medium for some other power source (hydrogen included), though from the looks of it, hydrogen powered cars (as we know them today) are more likely
3) a breakthrough in energy->motion conversion
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
Hydrogen is a power source, just bang a couple of atoms together with enough velocity and you get Helium + a lot of enrgy.
However we have not yet developed a working fusion reactor.
We'll just have to use the nearest one we can find, its only 93 million miles away, and has enough hydrogen to keep going for a few billion years.
hydride based car by United Nuclear? See http://peswiki.com/index.php/PowerPedia:United_Nuclear:Hydrogen_Fuel_System_Kit
Sigh, one simple economic indicator with thousands of variables. Fail.
But it's THE most important economic indicator.
What "other variables" are radically different between two neighbor countries?
Grams of Hydrogen in 1 liter:
Liquid Hydrogen -- 71 g.
Gasoline (C8H10) -- 118 g.
Diesel (C12H26) -- 130 g.
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.
>> We're not building nuclear power stations for one simple reason: We don't know what to do with the waste byproduct yet. There are very few places on this planet that we can store it, and even then there's doubts.
Goodness me- Why don't you simply "sequester" the nuclear waste? Just like you plan to "sequester" all your CO2? (LOL)
I love that word "sequester" - one word - sounds technical - and solves all the problems!
Like OMG, terrorists! Quick, somebody ban knives, toothbrushes, aircraft, jagged rocks, and pillows: all potential terrorist weapons.
I'd gladly live next to a nuclear plant.
Nice dodge, but factually and structurally unsound. 1) we aren't talking about "equivalent masses" here by a couple orders of magnitude, that's the whole point; 2) cesium boils at 1240F, so if you're breathing cesium vapor you've got more urgent things to worry about than the radioactivity; 3) more people actually die each year from CO2 inhalation than radiation poisoning; 4) thousands of pounds of radioactive carbon (in carbon dioxide) are regularly dumped into the air by the burning of fossil fuels...there's more, but you get my point.
Wrong. Just flat wrong. 99% of the fuel is reusable, once the remaining 1% has been removed. They do it in France.
"Lasts millions of years" meaning it sits there and does nothing at all interesting, acting exactly like it would if it weren't radioactive. That's what a long half life means.
I'd have no problem with it, nor should you if you fly on airplanes. In the "hottest" areas the dosage is down to 250 micro rem / hour, less than half what you get anytime you ride a jet. The vast majority of the area is down to levels on a par with many places (Denver, Cornwall, much of New Mexico, Grand Central Station,etc.) that aren't considered "uninhabitable" by reasonable people.
--MarkusQ
Because if you do the numbers you realize that, to replace fossil fuels with solar, wind, or hydro you'd have to devote so much land it'd be an ecological nightmare. Geothermal and tidal might be feasible but the cost of getting to them (building out beyond the coastal ecosystem or drilling down to where it's hot enough to be worthwhile) are far too expensive.
Space-based solar might work, if you could automate production and deployment with lunar materials, but that's still a lot further off than nuclear.
--MarkusQ
The Sippingport reactor went critical on December 2, 1957.
50 years on, 'Atoms for Peace' is remembered We know a lot about the commercial development of nuclear power.
The alternative to the diesel fuel we pump out of the ground is diesel fuel we make using nuclear power to synthesize. There are people doing research in, essentially, squeezing diesel fuel out of the air. The CO2 and water we produced burning those fossil fuels is now airborne, given enough power we can squeeze that back out of the air. There are working experiments that do that using solar power. Problem is that solar power is too dilute and unreliable to make such a process feasible except in a last ditch all else has failed effort. We have enough fissile material on Earth to last the human race possibly millions of years. If we figure out nuclear fusion power we will have enough power until the sun evaporates our atmosphere.
Here's the problem with synthetic fuels, it doesn't hurt. No one has to change a thing in the cars they drive or the filling stations they visit. There are too sides to this "save the planet" mentality. There are the anti-industry socialist dreamers, and the power mongers that exploit them to get rich and famous.
Nuclear power is probably the safest, cleanest, lowest carbon footprint power source we have. The waste problem is only a problem because we made it one. It's the fear and politics of nuclear proliferation that can be addressed easily with proper security of the fuel. Any by-product that is fissile goes back into the reactor. Any non-fissile byproduct has such a short half-life and small quantity that it could be handled easily by throwing it in a salt mine for a hundred years. Given that we build bridges and dams to last that long I don't see how we can't build a hole in the ground to last that long. Assuming we don't find some kind of industrial use for the waste first.
We have the technology to have a modern society and not destroy the environment. In fact most of the technology is at least 50 years old. Nuclear fission, hydroelectric dams, solar thermal, photovoltaic panels, and windmills in the right mix can provide the electricity we need. Take that electricity and synthesize hydrocarbons for vehicle fuel. Throw in a pinch of some old fashioned renewable bio-fuel (AKA wood, ethanol, etc.) and we are done.
The densest and safest means we have to store hydrogen is by attaching it to a carbon atom. We may have our "hydrogen economy" in the future but, IMHO, it will look surprisingly like our "petroleum economy".
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
No, I'm saying "economic indicators" are not the only one. Why don't we care Germany's prices to Polands? Polands to Russia's? Russia's to Chinas? Frances to England's? England's to Ireland's? You think method of production is the only variable? Silly.
.
Oil solved many problems.
It could fuel a lamp, stove, furnace, a stationary engine, a motorcycle, an air ship or an ocean liner.
The internal combustion engine means no more boiler explosions. It means you can shed all the complexities and dangers of coal and steam.
Petroleum products could be easily transported by ship, barge, pipeline, tank car, truck or aircraft to anywhere they were needed - in small amounts, by the barrel or the can. There is no "post-processing" required.
The Model T Ford could transport a family of four twenty-five miles on a gallon of gas.
That is a day trip by horse and buggy - without the expense of caring for the horse. Without - someone - having to remove 50 pounds of manure a day.
The Ford cruise safely and comfortably at 45 mph on a hard surfaced road - almost non-existent outside the cities, of course. But quite competitive with the suburban streetcar line or commuter railroad.
Why can't we maintain a world where everyone has a car? Nuclear power to generate the hydrogen... and there's always new nuclear material being manufactured in the earth's core. That's a lot longer term than oil at least, and perhaps solar might catch up one day, and we'll be able to turn off the bird and bat killing wind generators.
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
An article in the October issue of MIT Technology Review [1] stated that only 24% of the energy in gasoline is turned into kinetic energy - the rest is heat. So that simply means that the hydrodgen engine has the same efficiency as the gasoline engine. Unsurprising really. More ramblings on this and similar mis-information from the auto industry in the October issue of Oil IT Journal[2]. [1] http://www.technologyreview.com/ - logon required [2] http://www.oilit.com/corporate/4php/4c_makemonthly.php?year=2008&month=10 "On gas guzzling, CO2, horsepower and 'green' ... "
Editor Oil IT Journal - www.oilit.com
Actually you can skip two of those steps, jumping directly from heat to hydrogen in a "thermochemical" process such as: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sulfur-iodine_cycle
no, it's not like that. nuclear isn't cost effective. It requires more money to make it than it produces. If one equates money to fossil fuel - as is the basis of much of our economy - it isn't fuel efficient. Nuclear requires massive public subsidy.
People forget that there are MANY good reasons against nuclear because the grassroots activism movement thwarted the industry so effectively in the early 80s that after that people forgot to talk about it because it was assumed to be dumb and now we have a generation raised on hollywood movies who don't know where 3 mile island is.
Stupidity is its own reward.
What is the differance between using fossil fuels and hydrogen - if any?
The tailpipe. The ultimate PR of the automobile. Let's make cars not seem to pollute then that will solve everything?
There is no source of hydrogen fuel. We use fossil fuels to get it! Hydrogen is common but not in the unbound state (thus you have the energy release that makes it a fuel). And, on top of that, the change of energy states (chemical to chemical to electricity to storage to transport) is always going to make it less efficient. Unless we invent machines that defy entropy and thermodynamics. We're not going to have an engine that works cleaner, just seemingly so.
plus all the fancy new metals to make the new cars require insane amounts of coal burning, using an old car that belches fumes is often better because of this (In overall).
there are no green cars. Just greenwashed.
Sure hydrogen and solar could be nice. But it isn't going to power inefficient cars. If we rode bikes and trains, we could do it, but the fundamental problems of cars are cars and the fuel isn't really as signifigant as the 3000lb machine moving a 150lb load.
Sci-fi is nice but you should read Miriam Webster 'The Age of the Bicycle' for that real sci-fi of possibilities that are real and therefore the story is more interesting.
Waste Vegetable Oil is a nice way to power cars, but only until it starts being big business. Scale does matter. Cars can't work as a widespread system. They were and are intended as luxury items. We cannot afford them any longer - simple. And the luxury becomes meaningless when everyone uses it anyway.
Stupidity is its own reward.
Actually there is something to lose: time and perspective. Of course we should be open to all avenues... But we need to look at the fundamentals. Why don't solar, wind, hydro work? The same reason gas doesn't work and every other fuel. We demand to waste power. We don't need that much. Solar can supply us, in fact it is what does supply us ultimately. But we are relying on concentrated time (fossil fuels) because burnt right now. We don't need cars which are 85% wasteful in function if they had a 100% efficient engine. Cars move steep and status image. They don't move people very well. If we can't figure out solar (the basic system) how can we magically understand these derivatives of solar? We can't as long as we are so blind that we keep designing to Greenwash the private automobile.
Stupidity is its own reward.
I meant to say cars move STEEL, and are status symbols more than useful tools.
Stupidity is its own reward.
Pure hydrogen gas is a highly reactive species. For instance, it will react almost instantly with ozone. As well, because it's so light, it tends to float up and get blown off the top of the atmosphere. This means the planet could loose a lot of it's water and specifically it's hydrogen by long term attrition. Add to that the loss of the ozone layer, and you have some serious problems.
NT
If it has tires or tits, it will give you problems.
and what is natural gas? Oh, that's right: a fossil fuel. NEXT!
Now, if it becomes cheaper to produce hydrogen via electrolysis than by fracturing propane,
And what is propane? Oh, that's right: a fossil fuel. NEXT!
then it very much does make sense to talk about the "hydrogen economy".
No, it doesn't because it makes ZERO sense to take something that has a very high "Energy Return on Energy Invested" (ERoEI) ratio like Propane or natural gas, and turn it into something that has, BY DEFINITION a NEGATIVE ERoEI ratio.
In fact it's less than zero sense: it's completely stupid.
It seems like you are getting too much of your information about what the "hydrogen economy" is about from the MSM and perhaps a few popular blogs.
No, I get it from dedicated research since 1998.
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
Consider also that the possibilities for nuclear power generation have expanded considerably since the initial period of research in the '50s and '60s -- one of the major drivers for design choices back then was whether the nuclear program pursued would yield weapons-grade materials. Today, that's a liability rather than an asset.
There is a design for nuclear power generation, the Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor which can be much more fuel-efficient and cost-effective than the light-water reactors used in the US today. It also has much better passive safety (it cannot meltdown or explode, for example), and is suitable for use as a peak-load power generator.
There was a Google tech talk about it recently.
Bullocks. The fossil fuels industry gets a massive public subsidy (everything from dedicated infrastructure to wars on demand), while the nuclear industry is hampered by massive roadblocks erected at the public expense. It isn't surprising, given who has the money to buy legislation. Claiming (as you do) that the situation is reversed is getting into The Big Lie territory.
Level the playing field and then look at which is cost effective. Require that fossil fuel plants safely store (and track) all of their waste products forever. Make them remove the coal (or oil) after 1% has been burned and call the whole lot waste. Make it a federal crime to try to reprocess the "wastes" to use the remaining 99%.
See how good fossil fuels looked then.
--MarkusQ P.S.
Again with the getting things backwards. Hollywood routinely portrays nuclear power as much more dangerous than it really is. Three mile island is in Pennsylvania. The power plant is still operating (minus one reactor). There was no measurable increase in cancer, and no one died )or even got seriously injured) as a direct result (excluding people who may have been injured in the panic whipped up by the media). It is perfectly safe to go there, and even at the time of the accident the increase in exposure was far less than the natural background.
Well, France's prices recently were the lowest in Europe.
What you want to do is freeze a hollow piece of ice shaped like a torpedo, fill it with compressed CO2, release the pressure so that the CO2 solidifies and cap it with water ice, then just drop it overboard. By the time the water-ice melts, it should be stuck into the ocean bottom and the CO2 pools into a liquid until the sediments react with it. I haven't a clue about environmental impact of doing this, the subduction zone tend to be pretty wild environments as they are and that's where you would want to do it anyways.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
dry ice sinks in water, so does liquid CO2 you could just pore it down a hose, after a couple hundred meters of depth it should stay liquid because of the water pressure.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
Probably because none of those techs are close to being cost effective competition for nuclear or fossil. That's not to say they won't ever be, but you have to have some practicality here: we can't bet our economy on unproven tech. We can R&D it and blend it in and maybe someday it'll be the backbone. But we need a viable backbone now, too: nuclear is almost surely the best option for the next several decades.
Cheers.
It is only exceeded by your wilful ignorance of the second law of thermodynamics, which completely and utterly trumps any of your points, and which informs any and all discussion of ERoEI. As hydrogen will ALWAYS AND FOREVER have a negative ERoEI (once again, due to the kinds of fundamentals in physics a high school student could understand) there is absolutely NO point in considering hydrogen as a fuel or fuel component, especially as other alternatives exist that have much better ERoEI.
Thanks for playing.
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
I will go on a long walk, or ride my bike down a long trail, with my face in the Wind; Sun through my hair. I will drink Hydrogen when I stop to survey where I am, when I get to my place amongst the Green. Go green, or stay around your own area, only venturing out when necessary. Ride your bikes, or walk. To Carpool is Cool!
Actually, looking things up, liquid CO2 is actually [i]less[/i] dense than water of the same temperature - so it'd tend to rise.
Not to mention that you also have natural turbulence to contend with - some of it would tend to rise up, get absorbed in the water, etc...
Finally, don't forget that you're going to need to expend energy to pump all that CO2 down there - cutting your efficiency.
A 'standard' coal plant is about the cheapest form of power we have. Certainly the cheapest nearly universally deployable one. A 'clean', non-CO2 capturing plant, costs around the same as a nuclear plant of the same capacity, still emits more pollution, and has vastly higher fuel costs in comparison to the nuke plant. A CO2 sequestering plant is shaping up to be substantially more expensive than a nuclear plant, several percentage points less efficient, meaning even more increased fuel costs.
Personally, I think the first thing we need to do is install solar water heaters in about 80% of the buildings south of the mason dixon line. Compared to most other 'green' technologies they're cheap, efficient, and effective.
I don't read AC A human right
ERoEI stands for Energy Return on Energy Invested.
There are things that generate energy at a great return, some not so much, and some require MORE energy to create than what you get out of it.
Petroleum is the result of of millions of years of sea creatures dying and getting crushed into oil. The Energy Input was from the sun - the sun drove those processes, so we can see oil as a storage system of ancient solar energy. The sun shone on some critturs. They died, and were slowly crushed into oil by a variety of geological forces and chemical reactions.
You can look at Petroleum as our "savings account". Same with natural gas and uranium and thorium. Uranium and Thorium are also the result of solar power - just not our sun... They are also part of the "savings account".
Then there is energetic income. That comes from two places: the heat from the earth and the power of the sun and combinations thereof. Period. That's it. Thinking there is some kind of alternative to this is Real Pretending. There isn't.
Both of these sources, as income, are subject to the second law of thermodynamics. Hence: there is no 100% solar solution or geothermal or anything. Everything runs at a ratio of its input. This is a simple and inescapable fact of physics.
Hydrogen is predominantly locked up in two forms: hydrocarbons (which are in ever decreasing supply, as they are a limited resource) and water. Breaking hydrogen out of either of these bonds REQUIRES MORE ENERGY than you can get out of burning the hydrogen EVEN IF you got 100% efficiency out of it (which as noted, is impossible). Therefore, Hydrogen is not a fuel - it has negative ERoEI.
Batteries have a generally, if weakly, positive ERoEI, in that the energy used to make the battery is less than the energy the battery carries over a lifetime. Ultracapacitors are even better. The question then becomes: how do these systems get charged? By using energy income, which is either solar, geothermal, or a combination (like tide power or hydroelectric).
The problem is, there isn't enough material to generate the amount of electricity needed to continue the profligate lifestyle of contemporary western culture.
Which means that western culture will have to change. The world won't and can't.
The net result is fairly simple: the gradual disappearance of industrial civilisation, followed by the gradual disappearance of metal based tools. Eventually humans will end up back in the stone age. If it follows a bellcurve, then industrialism has another 200 years or so. Metal based societies have 5000 years, and then, that's it. Unfortunately, due to exigencies of energy requirements to acquire resources and the tendency of complex societies to collapse rather than transition and evolve, there is a non-zero probability of industrialism failing by the end of the century, and metal based societies disappearing within the next 1500 years.
The ONLY reasonable workable alternative is to simply modify society to do more with less, and reduce consumption to zero: essentially go to a
1. landbase centered system that recycles EVERYTHING including human waste
2. depopulate the planet by an order of magintude
3. do both at once.
That's it. Anything else will eventually lead to a tipping point and crisis. The solution is not technological. The solution is social and intellectual. But, being a fucking retard, I doubt you would find that palatable.
Now go back to your mommy's basement and play some more Halo. I'm sure it is training you in many useful skills. not.
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.