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Electric Car Nano-Batteries Aim For 500-Mile Range
An anonymous reader writes "Consortium members read like a Who's Who in technology research for the Battery 500 Project which aims to use nanotechnology to extend the range of all-electric cars 200 miles beyond the 300-mile range of gasoline powered cars. IBM, the University of California at Berkeley and all five of our US National Labs are collaborating to make the 500-mile electric car battery. Within two years, they promise to have a new kind of battery technology in place for the 500-mile electric car. If that happens, then I predict a mass exodus from gasoline to electric powered cars that will make the Toyota Prius look like a fad."
In order to replace the ICE (Internal Combustion Engine,) charge time needs to drop to less than 10 minutes. With recharging stations nearly as common as gas stations.
Batteries aren't going to do that. Supercapacitors will. (Or some yet-to-be-invented technology.)
sounds like fud from the days when people tried to introduce a clean burning hydrogen engine... Remember the Hindenburg!
Wherever You Go, There You Are
And a normal petrol tank is also a bomb.
Gasoline is only explosive under very specific circumstances. That's why cars have exotic hardware like carburettors and multi port fuel injection systems - to get the exact mix of gasoline and air that will ignite with the biggest bang.
Gasoline BURNS quite readily, but except for an initial "whoosh", it's not particularly explosive. In a sealed container it won't burn at all.
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
Exactly right. A 'statement of direction'. In fact, the poster should have read the article. IBM states that they should know in 2 years whether lithium-air technology will work or not. They didn't state a battery would be ready at that time.
*sigh*
I wasn't commenting on whether the figures were correct, just that the poster was measuring the wrong thing. Joules are a unit of energy, Watts measure the rate of energy. Yes, I know the difference.
The original poster's statement was meaningless. Read it carefully.
Watts, Joules, Volts and Amps are not just interchangable terms which mean 'energy stuff'. If people don't know what they mean, they should stick to Crystal Therapy.
Go ahead mod me 'troll', I don't care. I'm sick of New Age Science masquerading as the real thing.
In my area, gas is currently $2.50/gallon. Filling up with 10 gallons would be $25, and in a 30mpg vehicle would get you 300 miles. End cost is 8.3 cents a mile.
Meanwhile the Tesla Roadster* has a 53 kWh battery that would cost $5.30 or less in my area to fill up, at home. Could be as low as $2.65 if you make some deals with the power company and have the charger on a circuit they can turn off when electrical demand is high. Per the wiki, it can go 244 miles on that charge. That gives me 2.17 cents per mile.
Basically divide your gas bill by four in order to figure out how much an EV would save you in gas money**.
Right now the difficulty isn't so much the range or lifespan of the battery, it's the COST. If the batteries were 1/10th their current price, we'd be driving EVs today.
*I know it's too expensive, but it's the best known commercial EV.
**Assuming your driving habits are compatible.
I don't read AC A human right
At least in SyFy books. In real life however the actual evidence points to a net energy deficit when the entire fuel cycle is taken into account. But for some reason as soon as someone says something good about nuclear power on slashdot they instantly get modded up. I simply don't understand why there is a collective drop in IQ when the available scientific *evidence* and an examination of the legal and political constructs demonstrate statements like these are complete fantasy. So lets examine them;
Operative word "Comparatively", but what about some institutional assesments?
Standard and Poor's assessment of the Nuclear industry's financial viability "the industry's legacy of cost growth, technological problems, cumbersome political and regulatory oversight, and the newer risks brought about by competition and terrorism keep credit risk too high for even federal legislation that provides loan guarantees to overcome"
an assessment supported by Britain's Royal Institute of International Affairs "even with an explicit tax on carbon-based power generation, new nuclear power plants cannot be economical without government subsidies"
The breakdown of U.S energy research and development reported by the US DOE is roughly 60% for nuclear, 25% to fossil fuels and 15% to SUSTAINABLE energy sources. In addition to what I mentioned above you can add the 2005 U.S energy bill which provided another $13 billion dollars worth of subsidies, revocation of the Public Utilities Holding Company Act (PUHCA) which was put into law in 1935 to stop a re-occurrence of the 1929 stock market crash. The Price-Anderson Act to underwrite the Nuclear industry with $600 Billion of Taxpayer money and closer to a trillion if you factor the huge amount of land you are going to lose in the event of an actual accident.
Half a billion dollars worth of subsidies for procuring companies (i.e oil companies) proposing "pre-approved" reactor designs, even if they don't build it, and a 1.8 cent per kilowatt hour tax credit if they do. The reality is if the Nuclear power industry was forced to cover it's own liability and fund itself it would cease to exist. I could go on and on but the bottom line is how can America, of all countries, continue to justify this form of corporate welfare?
Ok, lets look at radioactive isotope emissions only. Over the entire industrial process radioactive isotope emissions are inevitable. Here are the *authorised* effluents not the accidents.
Mine tailing: radioactive mine tailings from open cut mining where ever it has occurred, radon 220, radium 226, thorium etc.
Enrichment: U-238 or DU. Used as weapon projectile, is pyrophoric and burns into a radioactive powder. Groundwater contamination from leaking Hexafluoride tanks
Reactor facility: tritium, iodine 131, xenon 141, 143, 144, cerium 141, 143, 144, tritium, tritium and tritium AND Noble Gasses Which Decay Into More Dangerous Daughter Products (Xenon 137, Krypton 90, rubidium 90, strontium 90, Xenon 135, xenon 133, krypton 85, Argon 39). Of course no epidemiological studies have been performed on the noble gas venting which are released hourly from *all* Nuclear reactors. (did I mention tritium) 4000 gallons of primary coolant water PER DAY containing plutonium 238,239,241, technetium 99, iodine 129, carbon 14 and *ahem* tritium which is highly mutagenic once it's in the foodchain.
Reactor decommissioning: cobalt 60, iron 55, nickel 63.
Radioactive Waste: Plutonium, Strontium 90, Iodine 131, Cesium 137 and on and on
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
This is how far I read because if you seriously think Nuclear power ends up in an energy deficit you are either completely ignorant about the subject, your sources are rubbish, or you are deliberately lieing ( or possibly a combination of the three ).
To give a slight idea of just how much energy is released in a nuclear reactor, the main limit of a reactor's power rating is how high temperatures the construction materials and cooling system can cope with. The reaction itself is limited only by the temperature at which the ceramic fuel rods and steel cladding melts, and at any time the fuel present in a large reactor contains more energy than entire countries consume in a year. If that is not enough to convince you, consider that the energy bound in chemical molecules like gas or petroleum is measured in electron volt, while the energy released in a fission reaction is hundreds of millions of electron volt.
Or put another way, one atom of uranium when fissioned will release an amount of energy equivalent to hundreds of millions of molecules of conventional fuel. Even if you take the fuel that has the highest chemical energy/weight ratio there is ( hydrogen ) it still releases only 1.53eV per atomic weight unit, while uranium fission is closer to a million eV per atomic weight unit.
For nuclear power to end up on an energy deficit the energy needed to extract, refine, burn and dispose it would have to be hundreds of millions times larger ( per atom counted ) than the energy needed to extract and refine conventional fuels. Now I accept that handling, mining, burning and disposing uranium and the waste products may be more involved than say coal. I'll even let you say 100 times more energy intensive, or heck why not say 10.000 times just for the hell of it, lets even assume coal is used 100% efficiently, and that only 1% of uranium is burned. You would still have THREE ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE to account for.
Really it is hard to grasp the energy released in nuclear reactions. A few kilograms would be enough to turn an entire city to ash, a couple of metric tonnes correspond to entire nations' annual energy consumption. Even though most reactors today only burn about 5% of it the amount much power you can tap from it is limited only by how much energy the cooling system can safely transport away, and the energy content is enough that a reactor can run for years without refueling.