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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."
until it actually happens.... This is more like a press-release rather than actual news.
The battery pack doesn't have to charge that fast. And a normal petrol tank is also a bomb.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
It IS a fad...
I spend all night charging my mobile phone. Its such a pain, sitting there and waiting for it to finish.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Well they are more of a fad/statement then anything else. You don't buy a Prius to be "green", you buy one to say "Look at me, I care about the environment". Now that may come off a bit trollish, but that certainly is the reality of the situation.
# cat
Damn, my RAM is full of cats. MEOW!!
"Yes dear, the battery in the car is flat, I've just got to wait an hour for it to charge, then I'll be on my way home..."
how about witching batteries ?
http://greeninc.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/05/13/better-place-unveils-battery-swap-station/
that's a battery swapping station, like a fuel station, except you don't have to leave the car, and it is faster.
Yes, I'm left. You have a problem with that?
I was too distracted by "Whose Who" to absorb much after that. Of course, most of it was after that.
What if I do the same thing, and I do get different results?
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.)
Within two years, they promise to have a new kind of battery technology in place for the 500-mile electric car. If that happens,
and the cost of the battery allows the car to be similarly priced to a gasoline car, and the charging time is reasonably short so when you run out you are not carless for 8 hours or something, and the infrastructure is in place to charge the car on the road,
then I predict a mass exodus from gasoline to electric powered cars that will make the Toyota Prius look like a fad.
There, fixed that for you
Negative moral value of force outweighs the positive value of good intentions.
If battery engineers can actually increase energy storage densities to allow 500 mile range electric vehicles, there will be something of a stampede among car buyers, yes. However, one key remaining factor will be the range achievable with about a 15 minute quick charge (i.e. a stop for a Slurpie). If that range is, say, about 200 miles (40% of maximum), and assuming the economics otherwise work (i.e. battery costs and durability), we may finally see the end of the internal combustion engine in widespread automotive use.
Electric transportation is humanity's next (and very important) step in reducing CO2 emissions. It has to happen. It will happen. But I think this (non)story is a little optimistic.
Many great minds have been working to improve chemical energy storage devices for 50 years. It's a fantastically complex problem. We've made strides, to be sure; compare the latest commercial lithium ion polymer batteries to 80s NiCD, and the future looks bright.
But two years is a very short time period, in battery development.
Still, good luck IBM.
A government is a body of people notably ungoverned - AC
Many people don't need 150 mile/200 Km range, and can start the switch petrol --> electric right away. I also don't see much need for a hybrid if you have 300-mile/500 Km electric cars. especially if there are battery-switch stations. You have also to realize that electricity costs less per mile/Km than petrol.
Yes, I'm left. You have a problem with that?
What will happen on the demand side of electricity when electric cars become common? Could it be that demand will quickly outgrow supply? What, oh what, will a KWH cost then? DIE, ELECTRIC CAR, DIE
9/11: Never forget it was a false-flag operation
I don't know to whom it belongs, but traditionally the directorty of notable identities is known as Who's Who.
Sara
Designer, Gamer, Macgrrl in an XP World
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
If they can make such dense batteries, I'd rather have 50 mile range with 1/6 the battery weight / cost. No use dragging around excess batteries all the time.
People will drive their cars and people will eventually switch but 2 years is MUCH too soon to think that we can start tearing down gas stations.
I expect that I'll still be driving the same car in five years, at which time it will be 30 years old.
Would I drive a new car if I could afford it? Possibly. Would it benefit me financially to do so? Probably not.
I've done some reasonably major repairs in the last couple of years - a reconditioned cylinder head, a wheel bearing, the distributor - but I've still spent far less in higher fuel consumption and those repairs than I'd have spent in interest on a loan and lost in depreciation on a newer vehicle.
Yeah, it'd be nice to have a lower carbon footprint from a more fuel-efficient hybrid. It'd be even nicer to have a slightly lower carbon footprint from an all-electric vehicle (we use brown coal for most of our electricity in my corner of Australia), and even better once our Illustrious Leaders convince the Great Unwashed to let us go nuclear. Trouble is, for all intents and purposes we're a single-income household (one adult is a disability pensioner - car, diesel spill, lamp post) with two kids and all the expenses that go with that. If it's a choice between environmental righteousness and actually maintaining a functional household, the household wins. Even on purely financial terms, without using my family as a rationalisation, keeping my old car going wins.
But you don't need 3 MW of power to move a car. Half the reason it uses so much energy is that A. two-thirds to three-quarters of the energy input is wasted (mostly in the form of heat), and B. another huge chunk of it is wasted lugging around that insanely heavy engine block and all the crap that it requires. You can easily get equivalent amounts of torque from an electric car that uses much, much, much less energy than a gasoline-powered car.
Gasoline contains 121 MJ per gallon, but by the time you factor in the efficiency, you're getting closer to 25-35 MJ per gallon, which is only about 8.3 kWh. With a 15 amp circuit at full capacity, every 5 hours charging is equivalent to a gallon of gas (approximately). As long as you don't *average* more than 60 miles per day, charging overnight is likely to be sufficient. And that's assuming a 110VAC charger. Most electric car chargers, AFAIK, are at 220VAC with a 30 amp circuit or larger, so it would only take two nights (or all day one day and night) to charge up a battery with a 500 mile range, give or take.
Sadly, it's not necessarily cheaper. At my current PG&E rate, even after accounting for the engine efficiency, gasoline is at a dead tie with what I paid at the pump on Monday---literally within tenths of a cent per gallon. If I could buy an engine that was 100% efficient, it would cost a fourth as much money to run a gasoline-powered generator as it does to buy power from PG&E, and that's at full retail gas prices. There's a fun stat for you, as though I needed any more proof that PG&E is screwing me.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
32MJ/l * 50l/(2*3600s) = 222kW aren't SI units wonderful? Transferring an amount of energy per time unit is the definition of power - and it is relevant. A normal electrical socket provides only ~1% of that value, they need to solve that too.
We can have batteries that are good for 10000 miles per charge and charge in 5 minutes, and that truly would be great, but that is not enough to make electric cars a mainstream technology. The real questions is, where will the energy come from? What energy source will be used to generate all of that additional electricity that our power grids will require? In North America we already have important segments of the power grid that are under supplied during peak load. Rolling blackouts are occasionally experienced. There is no capacity in the system for this.
The original poster states, "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."
This is simply impossible... without first figuring out how to generate huge amounts of additional cheap electricity.
Oil is an incredible substance. It is abundant ( which is why we can use rediculous amounts of it ) and very energy dense.
Creating a better battery is and exercise in developing an energy storage solution. We are talking about a battery with a high enough energy density to take us 500 miles on a charge. Thats nice but not nearly a game changer. This addresses the "energy density" problem, but not the bigger "energy supply" problem. In order to have a "mass exodus from gasoline", we have to find another source of cheap abundant energy first.
To get us all into electric cars we would need to generate much more electricity. We could:
- burn more natural gas or coal. In North America we burn copious amounts of that already to generate electricity. But then again,I'll stick with my gasoline engine if its going to come to that. As a bonus, in this case it is more wasteful to power our electric cars this way. We would be better of fueling our cars directly with natural gas. We would save the energy lost converting to electricity. Coal....could be complicated.
- pepper the world with renewable energy generation projects. I sure hope we do this. I'm pretty sure we will, but it will take time and a very large investment. Germany is WAY ahead of everyone else on this and still, they only hope to realize a goal of 45 percent renewable energy in Germany's total energy mix by 2050, and they don't think that will be possible without major conservation efforts. So, don't strap your buick to the backyard windmill just yet.
- innovate - find new power sources. I hope we do this too. Although the next big breakthrough could happen tomorrow, this will probably also take a lot of time and money.
Oil is an incredible substance. It is very abundant ( which is why we can use rediculous amounts of it ) and very energy dense. Replacing it will be a big challenge.
By the way, we already have an energy storage soltion that has a far greater energy density that of gasoline....hydrogen. Hydrogen is just like a battery. It is an energy storage medium (a very good one too) but not a source of energy. There is no freely available source hydrogen. Like electricity, we have to create it using some other source of energy.
a few more notes. the 30KW figure for the honda is based on air resistance not engine efficiency. So unless you are prepared to lie flat in a coffin shaped car, your pretty much stuck with the crossection of a Honda as the minimum useful car. Thus there's no way to beat that power demand by more than a small percentage let alone a factor of even 2.
You might suppose then that service stations will instead swap battery packs. But that does not really solve the problem well. At any moment a filling station might have 5 cars trying to fill up every 5 minutes. (probably even more in some stations) so no matter how you slice it, you need the filling station to be delivering 5*3.6= 18 megawatts of juice. (assuming perfect efficiency which won't happen).
This is huge problem that will require massive infrastructure changes to achieve.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
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.
The battery pack doesn't have to charge that fast.
Especially if it can go 500 miles on a single charge. The further it goes, the more likely it is that you won't need to charge it 'til evening.
This seems like a troll to me. But maybe not.
I just read this article about this history of the SUV:
http://www.gladwell.com/2004/2004_01_12_a_suv.html
I wonder if they did a similar study on Prius owners what the feedback would be.
I've been mildly considering a Prius, and my though was: it would be an efficient and responsible purchase (and buying an SUV would be an irresponsible purchase).
I suspect this is what people think. I was following a car the other day with this license frame: "Your SUV Sucks" "My hybrid sips"
So maybe the Prius is the SUV backlash.
Or maybe it's the first (practical) step towards really efficient cars.
Since no one's responded, let me be the first to say that you have absolutely no clue what you're talking about. Why you were modded up I'll never understand.
A Prius, in capable hands, is able to get in excess of 80 mpg. In not so capable hands it's still getting in the 40-50 mpg range. For lead foots it's still high 30s mpg. I know a guy who's a complete lead foot in his Prius (ie WOT almost all the time in the city, way over the speed limit on the highway, etc), and he still manages to get 40 mpg.
Absolutely false. If you're talking about the absolute highest MPG you'll ever get, then every single car right now will get better mileage at 20 mph than at 55 mph. Hell, I can easily get over 50 mpg at an average speed of 20 mph on my 5-speed MkV Jetta. However, the Prius is the most fuel efficient vehicle at each speed point from 1 mph to 100+ mph compared to any other car on the market. That's because at lower speeds, the car's computer turns off the engine until needed. The ICE has late intake valve closure (aka Atkinsonized cams), which makes the engine more fuel efficient. This, coupled with a more aerodynamic shape than most other cars makes the Prius more fuel efficient on the highway as well.
Theres nothing at all wrong with your Carbon footprint using an old car. Lets say you get a new one every 3 years, regardless of the energy consumption of the car itself, the energy and resources used in building a new car is quite alot. Pressed steel, oil based plastic bumpers, mouldings, interior parts, glass, paints, miles worth of wiring and electrical components, dozens of sensors, and the thousands of spare parts that need to be made to support a new model by the manufacturer. All produced by nice large factories who are about as carbon neutral as that brown coal power station. However you have one car over 30 years, instead of 10 cars over 30 years, and lets face it, a recon head, a dizzy and a wheel bearing arent alot at all for 30 years of use parts wise. I'd say you are doing well really. You are an automotive recycler. Be proud!
Insert something insightful here, or I'll insert something painful there.
No the original poster is quite correct. The Prius relies on the fact that the car is stopping and starting to lower the long run (average) energy requirements of the car. Hence you can use a smaller power plant and supplement the higher instantaneous energy demands with the electric motor driven from a storage battery. However when travelling at speed the average power requirement goes up and the IC has to work harder. If you drive conservatively (ie slower and very smooth) you don't overtax the IC and run it in an inefficient mode. If you try to keep up with every other car then that small power plant coupled with heavy batteries become a significant disadvantage.
By comparison my large Citroen C5 station wagon averages 5.6l/100km on long runs in summer with the a/c running over rolling hills without me being very careful*. My C5 is a much bigger car that is well within the margin of the Prius' efficiency on highway cycle, but worse round the town ~8.2 l/100km around the city for the last 3000km. As you will notice I get a significant increase in efficiency between city and highway driving, as all IC cars do. They are designed to perform well at high speeds and do OK around the city (people like fast powerful cars). This doesn't happen with the Prius, is can actually be the other way around.
More generally, if you look at other comparable small cars they do significantly better than my car and seriously embarrass the Prius. The Prius may look good in the US when compared to a SUV, but they suck in comparison other small cars and then there is diesel.
* Remember a single persons experience does not make a data set.
Last Friday/Sat I drove from Bergerac to Calais (both in france) via Reims. Distance covered 1070km on 55litres of Diesel in my 2004 Saab Estate.
I'll leave it to you to do the conversions but 300miles on a tankfull is just silly.
My 1969 Triumph TR6 Motorcycle in touring trim and loaded up with camping gear etc gets easily that distance on a 4 (uk)Gallon tank full.
Progress pah.
I'd rather be riding my '63 Triumph T120.
I think this is the key for battery powerered cars. Switching the batteries using a robot takes no longer than a stop at gas station. You don't own the batteries, you just rent them.
The hardest part with this is the need for the car manufacturers to commit to a few form factors. I think they are again too stupid and release brand specific batteries.
(I saw this working with electric bicycle rent service here in Switzerland/Engadin, where you've got a battery service in each village. You just change the batteries if they are empty. So you'll able to drive a whole day).
~Andy
yeah right, its going to be REAL PRACTICAL to put 500 mile range into a battery pack. the gasoline nozzle pumps 3 MEGAWATTS of energy into your gas tank in 2 minutes. try to get a battery pack to recharge that fast or hold that much energy and what you have is a BOMB (literally, a coupla sticks of dynamite)..
However, you cannot fill up the gas tank at home. That is one of the killer features of the battery: no more annoying visits to the gas station, just plug it in when you get home. No more fiddling around with plastic gloves/wait for your fingers to stop smelling of diesel.
And seriously, driving more than 800km in a day is a long stretch.
But I do not really believe that range will be the range on a motorway for a holiday-packed car :)
Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by rulers as useful.
1988 Citroën CX 22TRS, 17 gallon tank, 475 mile range and over 500 if I drive gently. This is a carb=fed contact-breaker ignition 1970s-era engine design, 2.2 litres and 115bhp. I used to get 32mpg for over 500 miles range but something's a little sick under the bonnet.
2008 Mercedes Vito 111 van, around 17 gallon tank, over 500 mile range, 116bhp diesel in a medium-size panel van. Again, about 30mpg.
It's worth noting that these are UK gallons, so 20 US gallons.
You're making contradictory assumptions. You can't claim that rapid charging is only for long distance trips and then claim that the 99% of commuters on highways will need to use it.
The only people who need a quick recharge are those going more than 500 miles at once with no long stops. If they stop to sleep then that's 10 hours to recharge at a hotel/motel. If they get to their destination same thing. If they stop to eat same thing. If the car isn't driving it can be charging.
With some rare exception even long distance trips are generally less than 500 miles one way and probably even both ways.
It's silly to take a system designed for gasoline and apply it to electric cars with no consideration for the inherent differences. Unlike gasoline electricity is everywhere. Every street, building, house and apartment has a gigantic ever refilling storage tank of it. You don't need to have special locations with giant underground tanks and tanker trunks to deal with it.
That's fine for people who will only ever commute or do short trips. What about an annual or even bi-annual vacation or an emergency that requires you to drive 600 miles? The fact is that battery-powered vehicles that require a lengthy recharge time are not practical for long term future use or wide-scale replacement of gasoline powered vehicles if that is the goal. The only technology that has any promise of providing the flexibility of gasoline without the associated issues of fuel supply is hydrogen. The GM HY-WIRE is a great concept of this technology.
Mod parent up please! This point is often skimmed over or simply ignored by those people who insist on a shiny new car every 3 years. Instead you hear them claim "It's low emissions, much better for the environment" or "I've gone for a smaller engine to be eco-friendly". The stark fact is that the cost to the environment of actually producing the new car is staggering.
Also, congrats to the GP, 30 years with one vehicle is impressive.
Moore's law is not a law. Theory, yes; Predictable trend, certainly; Law, no.
Except the Honda Insight and a number of 1.4 and 1.5 litre diesel engined small cars from Renault and Citroen.
Wrong. ICEs get better fuel economy in the vicinity of 50 mpg, just before drag becomes a major factor. See e.g. this chart.
Wrong. Turning off the ICE does not modify the car's tires' rolling resistance, or its air drag, or the (often substantial) load imposed by climate controls. The only reason that the ICE is not 'needed' instantaneously, is because the Prius is draining its batteries instead, and those must eventually be recharged by running the ICE. They could have easily given the Prius a very small gasoline engine, strictly for running a generator, which would run all the time.
The advantage of the Prius is that it can run its ICE at an optimal speed, rather than the constantly-changing speeds (many of which are sub-optimal) of a traditional car.
Wrong. Read up on electronic valve-trains (e.g. BMW), or variable valve-timing by advancing or lagging the timing chain (e.g. Toyota's VVTI).
FATMOUSE + YOU = FATMOUSE
Nuclear.
Comparatively cheap per megawatt, and per megawatt, the most enviromentally friendly power source we've yet discovered.
Faster than a V8 Jaguar XK, (0-60 under 5 seconds), 500+ bhp, 188 mile range (not bad for a sports car), recharge in _10_minutes_ http://www.lightningcarcompany.co.uk/home.php
With some rare exception even long distance trips are generally less than 500 miles one way and probably even both ways.
I beg to differ. Most long distance trips I do are longer than 500 miles. My mother-in-law lives about 550 miles from my home, my brother about 700 miles from my home, and only my parents are less than 500 miles (400 in fact) away from me. On the other hand: all of them live in Germany, so more than 80 mph cruising speed are not an issue, which easily allows to drive those distances during a day.
For me a car that takes longer than half an hour to recharge is useless for those distances.
For commuting I am using the bicycle, except for the time I am oncall, because then I have to lug around my tool boxes. A car that can only be recharged overnight thus has not much appeal to me.
(My current car interestingly though manages to go about 600 mls on a single refuel.)
No matter what the range is, there is always someone who needs to go a little further. If the battery range is 1000 miles then this author is likely to whine that he wants to go 1200 miles.
I sold my car, and bought an electric cycle this year, and I'm pretty impressed with it. I commute on it - charge it overnight once or twice a week, and don't get a sweat up even on hills into a head wind. Costs $5 per year to charge it, and $12 to insure it. Compared to my car it's ridiculously cheap - and because most of the time I'm passing cars that are waiting for other cars ahead, I get to work in around the same time as a car (12 minutes by bike. When there's no traffic I can do it 10 minutes in a car, but a normal morning is 15-20 minutes). I've seen those tuk-tuk's around where a bike pulls a carriage and takes a couple of people in the back. All you need is a carriage on it and a bigger motor and you could go anywhere in the city on it all weather, but to be honest it's not too hot to wear rain gear on the bike anyway as you aren't working, the battery is. I had to go out of town on a bus instead, but cost about the same as petrol for the trip would have or maybe even cheaper. Not quite the same freedom as having a car, but at less than 10% of the cost, I'm happy enough. I would say that within 3 years, at least 30% of the population will move to electric simply because of the cost. And I think it will be bikes not cars that show the biggest growth.
The car/battery needn't be useful for everyone in every circumstance to sell well, just useful enough for enough people to buy it. I can't go 600 miles in a day on my bicycle, but I still use it daily.
I live in Great Britain, so the furthest I could drive without meeting water is 837 miles (and the only people doing that trip are cyclists, it's a traditional route for obvious reasons). The furthest I've ever driven in one go is ~400 miles from ~Birmingham to the Scottish Highlands. If I'm travelling alone, a train is my preferred way to go (because of comfort and cost), with more people the car gets less comfortable but cheaper.
In continental Europe water doesn't get in the way, but still most people won't drive much more than 500 miles at a time for a bi-annual holiday.
What will happen on the demand side of electricity when electric cars become common? Could it be that demand will quickly outgrow supply? What, oh what, will a KWH cost then? DIE, ELECTRIC CAR, DIE
I don't think you understand how utterly inefficient a car engine is at converting gasoline into movement.
Basically, you could build gasoline power plant and run electric cars off the output. You'd power more cars and reduce kWh cost.
BTW: Oil is non-renewable, which means demand is guaranteed to outgrow supply.
I lost my sig.
Man, people on Slashdot are so negative and surprisingly restrictive in their thinking. All this moaning about "will never work, because I don't want to wait for my battery to charge" and hardly any ideas to solve that problem! Why not ALSO have the option to swap the battery at a service station when it goes flat. See: http://www.wired.com/autopia/2009/05/better-place/ for that idea.
Of course there is heat generated, the parent never said otherwise -- but just using rough figures, an electric motor, IIRC, can easily reach in excess of 90% efficiency, whereas a reciprocating gasoline engine would be lucky to get 30% efficiency. That is a significant difference, even before you take into account the losses in the multi stage transmissions that are required with an IC engine that are redundant with an electric motor. I can't remember off the top of my head how much is lost in a typical vehicle gear train, but it is of the order of ~10%. The weight issue is certainly much less clear cut. The motor itself will likely weigh less than the equivalent IC engine, and a heavy power transmission system isn't required with electric motors, but a battery pack will certainly weigh much more than the equivalent amount of petrol/fuel oil for quite a while yet....
put a live wire in the freeway and people can charge up as they go along and only use their batteries when on local streets. Wire up route 66 and a truck could breeze from coast to coast without burning a drop of gas. There are already powerlines alongside most roads.
*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.
No it doesn't. Take a beer bottle, fill it 3/4 full with petrol, insert a rag to act as stopper and fuse. Light fuse. Throw in such a way that it breaks on impact. The impact breaks the glass showering the surrounding area with petrol which is then ignited by the fuse. It doesn't explode, it spreads fire. (see also Molotov Cocktail)
I'm willing to bet that if you venture outside of the city, the outage rates are comparable.
As for oil lamps, that's not backwards at all. It's called preparation. You see, those flashlights need batteries and generally will not light up a room for several hours at a time. Those batteries start become scared when 100,000 people start attempting to replace theirs. Anyways, the economics are in favor of the oil lamps and candles. You can get some pretty decent candles that will last 2 or 3 nights at 4 or 5 hours a night for around 3 dollars. A 20 dollar oil lamp which will look pretty stylish on the fireplace mantel will burn a half pint to a pint of kerosene or Liquid Paraffin lamp oil that goes for between 5 and 7 dollars a gallon for about 7-8 hours. Considering that there are 8 pints in a gallon, it gets dark around 5 and you hit the sack around 10, that's about 11 days of emergency lighting for the costs of one or two sets of batteries. They can also be used to set the mood is you want to get naughty with the misses.
Anyways, it appears I'm not the only one who swears by oil lamps. I guess maybe you are just to inexperienced to be prepared.
Nuclear costs upwards of $8 million/MW for a power plant and then you have to pay for fuel. This is more than four times as much as for thin film solar PV. You might be thinking that the cost of energy rather than capacity is low. Not so. It is also the most expensive on a kWh basis. http://www.rmi.org/images/PDFs/Energy/E09-01_NuclPwrClimFixFolly1i09.pdf
> I predict a mass exodus from gasoline to electric powered cars that will make
> the Toyota Prius look like a fad.
It was.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Hydrogen holds some promise, but it's questionable right now. It's green to burn (or otherwise use) Hydrogen, just as it's green to use electricity. Both have the same original problem, though... you can't mine or otherwise locate sources of hydrogen anymore than you can do so with electricity. H2 is just a chemical answer for the battery.
Now, what you left out.. the big piece... is how that H2 is converted to electricity. Are you buring it, or feeding a fuel cell? The Fuel Cell is great idea... over 65% efficient, no "burning", thus, few if any pollutants (you would still have NO2 and other pollutants burning H2). We've been making these for a long time to power spacecraft... but they have the budget for it. Traditional fuel cells use lots of Platinum... same problems as large BEVs... no one wants to spend $150,000 on an economy car. Newer designs with engineered materials are promising, but there's more work to do. H2 storage is another issue... compressed gas is a hazard and also limited in capacity, while chemical storage (very similar to a NiMh battery) is higher density, but the cells wear out.
And you still want this to be a hybrid... a fuel cell likes to deliver a steady power output, it's not surgey at all.
Then there's the production of the H2... where does it come from? Like electricity, you can make it many ways... like, from electricity mixed with water to release H2 and O2. But that's not terribly efficient. You can make it from petroleum products, or from alchols, but there are also efficiency issues. In fact, very similar to those of the battery EV world.
And there's also the infrastructure problem. H2 refueling might be faster than electric recharging (it is now... it won't necessarily always be). Power distribution would ultimately have to be beefed up to support a BEV infrastructure, but it does exist today. H2 is non-existant... no one's building fueling stations unless they're in on the experiment.
-Dave Haynie
Smoker2, these two nice gentlemen from the FBI would like to have a chat with you about your posting of a detailed set of instructions to make and use a weapon of mass destruction.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
I would like to subscribe to his newsletter.
It's supposed to be completely automatic, but actually you have to press this button.
Great - now they're going to outlaw beer bottles!
Maybe they'll outlaw clothing, too, to eliminate rags.
A post a day keeps productivity at bay.
The problem is that everyone seems to think "Oh, I'll switch to electric, because petrol is so heavily taxed" but you're forgetting that once everyone switches to electric, they're going to have to find another tax to pay for all the road funds... which I predict will be a tax on either electricity or directly on your vehicle. Plus, cars containing a battery and electric motors are pretty much always going to have a significant cost premium over those running on internal combustion.
That's not saying we won't all make the switch eventually. But thinking that long-term you're "saving money" is probably not the best bet. Sell it on how "green" it is, or reducing dependency on foreign oil is a better (and more accurate) pitch.
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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.
I've been doing fine with $5/gal gas for years. $20-$25 per gallon gas would go mostly unnoticed if we all have electric vehicles. Aviation, on the other hand, would become prohibitively expensive as there is no affordable replacement for fossil fuels in sight for large aircraft.
All the more reason to switch to electric cars and renewable+nuclear and conserve what fossil fuels are left. The planes really need the dinosaur juice.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
You see, they have these nifty things called "car rental agencies." I predict that if small electrics become common, there will be a great opportunity for companies to rent larger trucks & gas-powered cars for people that only need them every few months to haul stuff around or go on a trip.
Your savings on gas would more than pay for the occasionally necessary rental.
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.
The part where it is chemically equivalent to hydrogen and hence rapidly dissolves and disperses in water, quickly being diluted to lower than background levels. In addition the very low energy of the beta radiation it emits, it's tendency to be ejected with urine or sweat if ingested ( as opposed to staying in the body ) the short half-life, the minuscule amount produced, and the lack of any major pathway into the food-chain that would not first dilute any release by many orders of magnitude.
Honestly of all the elements in nuclear waste tritium is one of the more harmless ones. If you want to do scaremongering it's Iodine, Caesium, Strontium, Technetium and Neptunium you should harp about ( your arguments would still be rubbish of course, but those are the elements most likely to cause trouble ).
Good thing then that the secondary circuit is also a closed circuit that is heavily monitored for radioactivity. Seriously can you quote even a single incident where a dangerous amount of radioactive material was released through the secondary circuit ?
I got news for you buddy. Your body fluids are radioactive, as is air, milk, ponies and everything else on the planet. If it is dangerous or not is not simply a matter of it containing something radioactive and being a lot of it. The concentration, chemical properties, decay constant, and concentration matters. It is physically impossible to do ANYTHING without releasing small amounts of radioactivity. Even the carbon dioxide in the air you exhale contains some C-14. The authorised emissions from nuclear power-plants are set sufficiently strict that if you lived next to one for 50 years you get just a couple of "banana units" equivalent of exposure ( the same amount as you would get from eating a few bananas ).
I don't know if you are unaware of the serious flaws in your scaremongering, or if you do it deliberately, in either case you've quite clearly demonstrated that your claims are half-truths at the very best if not deliberately misleading.