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Will New Battery Technologies Smash The Old Order? (telegraph.co.uk)
"The world's next energy revolution is probably no more than five or ten years away," reports The Telegraph. "Cutting-edge research into cheap and clean forms of electricity storage is moving so fast that we may never again need to build 20th Century power plants in this country..." Slashdot reader mdsolar quotes their article:
The US Energy Department is funding 75 projects developing electricity storage, mobilizing teams of scientists at Harvard, MIT, Stanford, and the elite Lawrence Livermore and Oak Ridge labs in a bid for what it calls the "Holy Grail" of energy policy. You can track what they are doing at the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E). There are plans for hydrogen bromide, or zinc-air batteries, or storage in molten glass, or next-generation flywheels, many claiming "drastic improvements" that can slash storage costs by 80pc to 90pc and reach the magical figure of $100 per kilowatt hour in relatively short order.
"Storage is a huge deal," says Ernest Moniz, the U,S. Energy Secretary and himself a nuclear physicist. He is now confident that the U.S. grid and power system will be completely "decarbonized" by the middle of the century.
One energy consultant predicts the energy storage market will be worth $90 billion in 2025 -- 100 times larger than it is today.
"Storage is a huge deal," says Ernest Moniz, the U,S. Energy Secretary and himself a nuclear physicist. He is now confident that the U.S. grid and power system will be completely "decarbonized" by the middle of the century.
One energy consultant predicts the energy storage market will be worth $90 billion in 2025 -- 100 times larger than it is today.
Research into battery storage has been intense for 20 years. We've had promises of drastic improvements, and we have seen some significant improvements. Yes, R&D has picked up even more but improvements are more likely to be incremental than breakthrough.
...and yet all the gains we get from battery improvements will continue to be squandered on yet more and more layers of JavaScript.
Boo.
Umm, no, that's not a magical figure by itself. I want to see below a penny per (kilowatt hour * full discharge cycles).
If I had a penny for every slashdot article about batteries since the late 90s, I'd...
Many of the advanced battery technologies will have toxic chemicals. With huge production volumes, there's going to be a lot of poisonous waste materials. I suspect the environmental damage of new batteries is going to make the claimed damage of carbon seem like happy-fun-day.
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... Government subsidizing the development of new technologies has the universal effect of distorting competition and making any such projects fail. ...
Like the railroads, airplanes, nuclear power, computers, the Internet, GPS, biotech, all of which had heavy US government subsidy in the beginning.
It's kind of interesting the games we play with our own heads and, at a national level, with propagandizing ourselves to flee from the monster in the room without actually looking at it.
If we can find a way to store solar energy it is going to help, doubtless -- but not NEAR enough. The real problem is not "climate change" but oil, water, and mineral DEPLETION. We're rapidly nearing the point where the energy to extract more fossil fuel will exceed that from the additional fossil fuel. That is the monster nobody wants to talk about -- and God knows our "leaders" don't want to face. I'm not saying global warming isn't an issue, but it's way, way, way, down the list versus actually running out of oil...to purify and pump the water, to fuel the furnaces to smelt the metal, to run the mining equipment, to extract the critical minerals, to fuel the Habler process, to create the fertilizer, to make the plastics, to make the herbicides and pesticides, to grow the fuel. It takes TEN calories of oil to bring one calorie of food to the table. You are not going to run anything remotely resembling today's consumer driven, leaving-on-a-jet-plane, cheap and fast food economy with solar energy. Think about it and do some basic math. And consider that we're being sold a dream...that is propaganda. And oh how we want to believe rather than look at the elephant in the room.
We've been reading about such storage breakthroughs, along with "dramatic" improvements in solar technology, for something like 50 years now. We've been reading about energy from nuclear FUSION for sixty years -- and the two story lines seem to both be filled with an awful lot of Hopey, urging us to join hands and sing Kumbaya a little louder while the darkness gets a little closer.
When do we actually turn to reducing energy consumption, reducing importing from China, fighting fewer wars, importing fewer foreign workers, and actually get down to the business of "think global act local"? Just wondering. Hope is not a strategy.
Right around the corner again? Just like we're told every few years... no thanks. Articles full of progressive unicorn farts exist just to keep bad writers from starving.
That's the only thing that worries me. The current system requires lots and lots of public infrastructure. That keeps prices down for the poor (economies of scale and whatnot). That's not gonna last If even the upper middle class doesn't want/need that infrastructure. The folks most able to pay for it aren't going to want to. They won't be using it. But it'll mean going back to the dark ages for the lower class...
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Depends on who you are rooting for; transmission works great for the entrenched utilities, but batteries work better for off-grid and micro-grid. Long term, batteries are likely to prove better for distributed generation as well.
From an engineering, policy, and economic perspective I prefer distributed generation and emphasis on micro-grids; it works very well for everything but city cores, but those cores should be focusing on district heating and cooling, which might make them take longer to leave carbon and nuclear fuels.
Good luck with that until you solve Zinc's whiskering problem. Powergenix thought they had it solved with Nickel-Zinc batteries. Nope. 1.6V 2300 mAh is nice but not when you get less than 150 charge cycles due to whiskering.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Wrong decimal place. $77.78/kwh.
It's an mdsolar production, bashing nuclear is part of the game
Germany has plenty of problems with renewable energy, but they have an excellent national grid (much like the rest of Europe). A problem is that conventional plants cannot always ramp up or down quickly enough to cope with highly variable renewable power, and having a good national grid doesn't always solve that problem. You end up buying extra power at inflated prices, or are forced to dump power and sometimes even pay for the privilege. The grid manages but the economics fail. And that is where power storage comes in: it doesn't just balance the load but also prices.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
As many have posted here, his lack of objectivity is annoying and unhelpful.
Thanks.
There are enough reasons to be in doubt about Hinkley Point C.
But only a little may cover the situations that worry you and used EV batteries may provide all that is needed.
...and wait for technology to catch up. At some point cost efficient storage has the capability, as TFA notes, to dramatically alter the utility and (especially) the cost-efficiency of intermittent renewable sources. The other critical point is energy transportation -- moving e.g. PV solar energy from Arizona or Texas to Maine without dropping half of it along the way. In the meantime, can we stop panicking and wasting huge amounts of money IMPLEMENTING immature technologies while they are -- immature?
rgb
Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken. --- Bertrand Russell.
For how long, and what is the usage cycle for these 'used EV batteries' ??
I can envision a future where there are piles of depleted/partially depleted 'used EV batteries' everywhere, and most of the value has been squeezed out of them. There they sit, with their seals deteriorating, and the lithium in them igniting.
.
I remember when nuclear power was touted as being "too cheap to meter." No one ever talked about its by-products.
to push the entire planet away from the conditions that humans evolved to live within
Wow, in fell fell swoop you not only show that you know zero abut the history of the Earth's climate, but also that you actually believe evolution works exactly the opposite of the way it really does!
Humans evolved over time to work within whatever climate they were given which changed dramatically over time - historically it's already been way warmer than it will be from the latest round of climate change, and vastly colder as well (which it will be again someday, not a cycle we can stop). They did not evolve through thousands of years just to mesh with the environment we have today (and which humans evolved "correctly" then, given that some live in very warm climates and some in very cold?), which is itself nothing but a transitory state that was never going to last.
So even if it gets warmer humans will do what they always have done - adapt co conditions as the change.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
We're rapidly nearing the point where the energy to extract more fossil fuel will exceed that from the additional fossil fuel.
People have been saying that for something like 50 years... and it's less true than ever before. New technologies like Fracking always come along to keep cost of extraction cheap. The whole reason the price of oil has tanked is exactly because it's so cheap to use fracking to fossil fuels...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
That's the same place we were 5-10 years ago. Any improvement in battery technology is far more likely to be incremental than revolutionary. Even when lithium based batteries became mainstream about 12-14 years ago it was an incremental improvement and nothing anywhere close to an order of magnitude or more which would place thier energy density more on par with chemical fuel sources.
I was talking about subsidizing the development of new technologies, not subsidizing the implementation of existing and proven technologies. Rail transport, for example, was an existing technology and not invented in the US.
But your comment made me dig up a bit about the history of airplanes and it was rather funny in this particular context (from Wikipedia):
The Flyer cost less than a thousand dollars, in contrast to more than $50,000 in government funds given to Samuel Langley for his man-carrying Great Aerodrome.
The Flyer was the first airplane made independently by the Wright brothers, and it cost them approximately $1000 to build. The Great Aerodome (name says it all) was a flop, and it received $50 000 in government funding.
Now I don't really understand why someone would think I'm a troll. These are/were my personal thoughts, which should be apparent in my original post, and they are stemming out of personal experiences in an org that dealt government funding to companies.
-SR
I live in a medium density urban area, I want to go off grid. Not out of some prepper issue, nor are my present rates particularly abusive. I just hate utilities. I hate the people who run them. I hate the regulators who regulate them. I hate that they look at my house and see a guaranteed revenue stream. I want to cut them off and I will pay extra to do so.
I will even inconvenience myself to do so. I would happily rewire my house so that the LED lighting isn't converting from 110 but from something the batteries were happier providing. I would coat the roof in solar cells, and I would buy a little generator to fill in any gaps. The same with things like my fridge or other power grabbers, they could be 24v or even 12v if needed.
Here is my dream day. The utility goes to the government and demands that regardless of my being hooked up or not that I still have to pay them for the lines that run past my house, and the regulator says, "NOPE".
To me it boils down to the utilities should be a public good like roads, and schools. Not for profit should be the rule. Yet I see board members at these utilities making huge multiples of the average person's salary, let alone the heads of the companies, or the investors.
Randroids always forget about those and pretend that something like nuclear power, which is incredibly expensive and difficult, would have ever existed without the taxpayer bankrolling it.
Depends on who you are rooting for; transmission works great for the entrenched utilities
It also works great for governments trying to collect taxes.
It is much harder to tax electricity flowing between someone's roof and their kitchen.
The original estimation for the price of an EPR at this size was 3 billion pound, now we are talking about 24,5 billion pound for the construction. The whole cost of Hinkley Point during its operation is estimated at 37 billion pound.
Hinkley Point is the "F-35 of power plants". At least with Theresa May, Britain finally has someone with enough sense to pull the plug.
The article bashed nuclear in general, which is unfair. Bashing Hinkley Point is however totally fair. No idea why making this point suddenly got my post modded 'Troll', but ah well =/
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and you've got enough energy to time travel.
Exactly. Give me a CANDU 6 plant that's actually reprocessing its "waste" any day of the week and twice on Sunday. It's safe, reliable, and oodles of power coming from a small footprint. But no, instead we'll elect to dump all our R&D into new tech that uses tons of rare Earth elements, uses huge amounts of space, isn't dependable (due to weather), can't handle base load, requires lots of toxic chemicals to produce, has to be replaced every other decade, destroys ecosystems housing endangered species, and basically just fucking sucks.
We have a solution to power requirements that doesn't cause any major issues. Replace all coal, oil, solar, and wind power with CANDU 6 power plants and reprocess the "waste" until it's so low energy that it can't hurt anyone. You'll end up with a relatively tiny amount of low-energy waste and a whole lot of fairly cheap, reliable, safe electrical power. If we made it a national priority, we could go 90% nuclear in 10 years in the US, but we'd have to wipe out a whole bunch of local government NIMBY regulations that do absolutely nothing to make anyone or any thing any safer.
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
It's mdsolar; they won't submit an article that doesn't bash nuclear power. It could be an article about Python, but it better have something about how nuclear power is bad and dangerous or mdsolar won't submit it.
Still waiting to see if mdsolar will ever respond to the fact that - per kwh generated - nuclear power is safer (causes less human deaths) than solar.
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
Strikes me that stationary use is a more stable condition than mobile use. Probably pretty manageable.
You forgot that batteries are reused. Consider a 10,000 cycle battery.
Only if the EVs are all being charged rather than during the day.
Brain activity decline observed at 600 ppm, 1000 ppm atmospheric CO2.
Satish U.; Mendell M. J.; Shekhar K.; Hotchi T.; Sullivan D.; Streufert S.; Fisk W.J. (2012). "Is CO2 an Indoor Pollutant? Direct Effects of Low-to-Moderate CO2 Concentrations on Human Decision-Making Performance" (PDF). Environmental Health Perspectives. 120 (12).
Joseph G. Allen; Piers MacNaughton; Usha Satish; Suresh Santanam; Jose Vallarino; John D. Spengler1Satish U. (2016). "Associations of Cognitive Function Scores with Carbon Dioxide, Ventilation, and Volatile Organic Compound Exposures in Office Workers: A Controlled Exposure Study of Green and Conventional Office Environments". Environmental Health Perspectives. 124 (6).
Seriously, the idea that storage will solve the need for base-load energy is just amazing to me. The reason is that MOST of the AE that is being pushed is from the sun and easily blocked. Many will claim no, but any number of the major volcanos on the west coast, can block 5-20% of our sunlight. That will bring solar AND WIND down quickly. This issue does not include the coming ability to control weather and then force clouds to block the sun elsewhere.
As such, we NEED clean base-load power. Geo-thermal is great, but limited. H2O is Limited in America. As such, we need Nuclear power. Everybody wants Fusion, but we also need to clean up our current nuke waste. The best way is to build gen 4 reactors and then burn up the majority of that waste.
And yet, ppl like mdsolar will continue to fight against Nukes, and push an AE ONLY future, even though it can not solve the CO2 problem in time.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
"Transmission seems to solve almost all the problem with getting renewable energy to match demand."
So why do Greens protest against transmission lines by reflex action, including those built purely to bring renewable sources to market? Examples are Sunrise Powerlink and the German Stromautobahn.
As someone that has worked in the battery industry my whole life -- no - it is just the usual corporate welfare. The improvements are very small 1% and expensive.
Lithium was a big deal - moving from 2 electrons to 3 - the other stuff is not really important - mostly noise - venture vulture stuff to get investors money.
What is always missing is the real cost of battery power. A battery has a cycle life - take that number times the capacity of the battery and you get the total amount of power the batter will deliver. With that you can get a cost per kWh .. assuming the electricity to charge is free (it is not) - it is still very very expensive power.
Now - in a electric hand drill - I am quite willing to pay the high price for that power - but not for running air-conditioners or powering a car.
New technologies like Fracking always come along to keep cost of extraction cheap.
Fracking has been done commercially since the 1950s so calling it a new technology is not really accurate. There have been some advancements in fracking but what really has made it viable is the worldwide price of oil going north of about $40/barrel. It's more expensive than drilling into big reservoirs of oil like in Saudi Arabia but the technique is nothing new. It's just become economical in the last 20 years as the price of oil has intersected with the cost of fracking.
The whole reason the price of oil has tanked is exactly because it's so cheap to use fracking to fossil fuels...
The reason the price has gone down is because there is a temporary oversupply. Fracking is a part of that but a bigger part is countries like Saudi Arabia intentionally pumping out more oil than demand dictates. Too much supply + not enough demand = low prices. It's a mostly a short term supply and demand thing rather something inherent to the cost of pumping. We had the price 2-3X what it is today not long ago for similar reasons. I expect we'll see prices like that again at some point, though not for a few years probably. Good time to buy oil/gas stocks if you're comfortable owning evil companies.
good posting, but slightly wrong.
You say that micro-grids are the way to go, yet, what is of concern is how to get costs cheap, AND to serve our national SECURITY needs.
For example, we are about to move to EVs for our transportation. Great. Clean. Cheap. And was a Tesla owner, FAST with great driving.
BUT, what happens when volcano blows or another nation controls the weather better? Clouds. LOTS OF CLOUDS. ANd a loss of sun, which also drops the wind. So, right when you need the energy, it goes away if we are heavily dependant on solar/wind.
OTOH, if we have a MATRIX of electricity and we use the grid to move electricity across the nation, it means that if we lose power in one area (blocked sun, attacks, etc), then we can use the grid to help various areas.
As to economics, a matrix normally is best. If you become dependant on one energy input, then you have to bolster it in some other fashion. It is for that reason that I LOVE Solar over Parking lots, roof tops, but hate it in massive projects out in the desert or other areas. We need to provide cheap electricity to buildings and batteries, so that they form a good chunck of the grid.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
no. Not even CLOSE. The reason is that if a volcano blows, then we are blocked for weeks or months. And if it is yellowstone, it is for YEARS.
THe smart society plans for LONG TERM ISSUES. It is because we used to do that, that we had the electrical grids, telephones, railroads, tugs, airports, and even highways put in all around America. It is also why America at one time developed the vast majority of this AE. Nearly ALL OF THIS happened in America. The issue has become that over the last 30 years, we have gone backwards due to the GOP/neo-cons/tea*. BUT that is a different issue.
Regardless, the smart society PLANS for seucrity issues.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
... for the time being. It's cost that's currently the main hindrance. And that is being squished big time as we speak, or so a notable amount of credible experts say.
An modern IC engine has north of 200 moving Parts, required gearbox not counted. A modern electric Car engine has 18 moving Parts and needs no gearbox.
Once battery prices have dropped beyond a certain threshhold the entire global Auto industry will Flip so fast it will make our heads spin. This is bound to happen in the next 5 years, probably in the next 3, once battery prices are low enough.
Gasoline in Personal Transport is on the way out, that's pretty much a given. And the advancements in cars will feel like the transition from steam to oil back in the day.
Or even more significant.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
The new technology is wonderful. And some changes are painful. But we still completely fail to deal with consequences of the rapid changes we are seeing. For example we know coal will be shut down. That means that big coal will have no money to repair damaged areas that are unsafe due to pollution. So is anyone doing anything to force big coal to have cash reserves for future clean-ups? Then we have the displaced workers in the coal industry who often live in areas where no other employment options exist. We simply can not abandon those workers and destroy the economy of states like W. Va..
If the Yellowstone supervolcano blows, it's pretty much game over for most of the human population of the planet. The global cooling and ash deposition would result in worldwide famine for a decade or more. Power production is somewhere near the bottom of the world's concerns in that situation unless and until we build a huge underground cave underneath the entire American south with fertile soil and giant light fixtures.
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no, it is NOT over for human life. Heck, we have seen other super volcanos blow and life does just fine.
The last time that Yellowstone went it was at the high end of a VE7, and is expected this time to be at low-end of VE7 or highend of VE6.
And here you go: But a Yellowstone megablast would not wipe out life on Earth. There were no extinctions after its last three enormous eruptions, nor have other supereruptions triggered extinctions in the last few million years. [Wipeout: History's 7 Most Mysterious Extinctions]
However, it WOULD be criminal for our politicians to NOT plan for needing electricity since we are about to become very dependent on it. This is why I go after the far left. They continue to ignore facts, logic and science just like the far right and China are doing. Basically, the far left has become complicit in causing as much of the world destruction as the far right and China are doing.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
In mobile use, the batteries are only used until the cost-benefit of the batteries weight renders them not useful for mobile use. They were well maintained during this part of their useful life and will be designed to contain the energy properly.
Then, the scenario goes, they are removed from mobile use and put into stationary use. The problem being, in stationary use, they can just sit there indefinitely, and will sit there indefinitely, and deteriorate. Eventually to the point of enclosure voids and lithium fires.
They could be properly maintained during this part of the life cycle, but does anybody seriously think they will be? The cost/benefit for these batteries implies keeping costs low. There will be scrap batteries over the place being squeezed into use until they are completely depleted, meaning there will be lots of batteries not being properly maintained.
These batteries tend to report on their own health.
Not sure what you mean by this. V2G is interesting for stability but used batteries are the sort of thing you'd use to store solar or wind for later.
Champlain Hudson Power Express has got support. Maybe your examples are from poorly planned projects.
no. Not even CLOSE. The reason is that if a volcano blows, then we are blocked for weeks or months. And if it is yellowstone, it is for YEARS. THe smart society plans for LONG TERM ISSUES. It is because we used to do that, that we had the electrical grids, telephones, railroads, tugs, airports, and even highways put in all around America. It is also why America at one time developed the vast majority of this AE. Nearly ALL OF THIS happened in America. The issue has become that over the last 30 years, we have gone backwards due to the GOP/neo-cons/tea*. BUT that is a different issue. Regardless, the smart society PLANS for seucrity issues.
I don't see a lot of volcano planning in your examples.
I never said extinction. I said dramatic population reduction. The previous eruptions didn't occur in a society where 7 billion people were consuming approximately as much food as we are capable of producing technologically.
The ash cloud from a Yellowstone eruption would be expected to blanket most of the U.S. In affected areas, crop yield could fall to near zero overnight, and farmers would end up starting over. Given that the U.S. produces over 40% of the world's soybeans and corn, and 13% of the world's wheat, if those three numbers plunged, it would wreak havoc on an already stressed agricultural system. There's a good chance you would see significant famine and death.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Oh boy, where do I get that? Oh ... I can't ...
No it isn't. Wind and solar costs considerably more than coal and gas. The "fuel" may be free, but the amortization is anything but free.
Off by 100 times? That makes quite a difference.
I know there was a lot of interest in V2G a few years back, as you say primarily for grid stability, but everything I heard at the time indicated that it wasn't really effective, or at least not a game changer. From a utility side, you really need at least 1MW dispatchable on a 69kV circuit to have a meaningful impact. V2G offers distribution grid stability where you have a lot of residential solar, but not much for transmission stability.
Well, two year old breakthroughs notwithstanding https://www.ornl.gov/content/h...
Whoosh.
My coop goes in for AC control to handle that. They seem to control it wirelessly. I expect water heaters will play a role soon as well.
technologies are usually "smashed" by newer technologies.
usually mobile homes or manufactured homes but sometimes ones they build or maintain themselves (being blue collar). The houses might be shabby and falling apart, but they own them. In America home ownership is the only way to get ahead if you're not already rich. You lock in a rate (usually a reasonable one) for your housing costs. Rent goes up anywhere from 4-8% a year (they 8% spikes are recent and brought on by a lack of new building because we're running out of land that was developed before we stopped infrastructure spending). My worry is the poor (especially the Working Poor) are either going to be completely shut out of home ownership and trapped in the cycle of increasing rents. Moreso when a $50,000 solar battery system is part of the minimum barrier for entry on a home.
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. If we made it a national priority, we could go 90% nuclear in 10 years in the US, but we'd have to wipe out a whole bunch of local government NIMBY regulations that do absolutely nothing to make anyone or any thing any safer.
Great! Lets do just that! A good place to start would be implementing your foolproof method of uniting all US citizens behind you. Make sure you use data and experts and jesus to prove your point.
They could be properly maintained during this part of the life cycle, but does anybody seriously think they will be? The cost/benefit for these batteries implies keeping costs low. There will be scrap batteries over the place being squeezed into use until they are completely depleted, meaning there will be lots of batteries not being properly maintained.
If battery maintenance turns out to be a problem (and it's not clear that it actually will be; what sort of maintenance, exactly, would these batteries require?), it seems like it would be easy enough to deal with: Add a $X deposit to the batteries' purchase price, and pay the deposit out when they are recycled. Et voila, now there's an economic incentive to properly recycle any battery old enough to be worth less than $X, rather than just letting it sit until it's worthless junk.
We've dealt with this problem before (e.g. for 12V lead-acid automobile-starter batteries); solutions are known.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
if you're relying on the savings from home ownership to make up for your stagnant wages and fund your kid's future than adding a $50k mortgage on top of it just so you can have electricity is going to hurt. A lot. If you don't already own a home that $50k is going to put a mortgage out of reach and put you in a exploitative position in relation to landlords who can.... :(.
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So you are basically dismissing the Manhattan Project here. Even the investment on The Aerodrome was not totally useless. It ended up producing an engine design way better than anything the Wright Brothers had. A water cooled radial engine with 5x the horsepower and less weight. You are also comparing apples with oranges. The $1000 was cost in parts only while the $50000 was parts and labor.
Need material for your nuclear weapons program but can't get the right isotopes?
CANDU
India did that after all.
That's as far as the "reprocessing" goes with that reactor.
For general high grade waste processing, no it's not going to work with current reactors running today. There's a thorium based design that looks like it will come closer than anything before but there is no magic yet that will reprocess everything in fuel rods let alone other nuclear waste.
Betteridge's Law of Headlines: Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
What made fracking viable was the advent of directional drilling.
If oil is at around $36/barrel. Over 50% of the oil production in the US comes from fracking these days. If oil prices fall below $30 for a sustained period then fracking producers cannot remain in business. Right now the OPEC countries are pumping a lot of oil intentionally to keep prices low and put a squeeze on fracking producers and can do so because of their cost advantage. But this strategy cannot be sustained indefinitely since their oil reserves are finite and the oil that is more expensive to extract is still in the ground. Furthermore most of the OPEC countries set their federal budgets based on oil prices higher than they currently are so there will be political pressure to ease off on pumping sooner rather than later.
Yeah, except that CANDU reactors are not weapons proliferation resistant. See: India's nuclear weapons program, all because of CANDU.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
Great! Now point out something that actually uses a lithium phosphorus oxynitride electrolyte outside of a lab.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
And, it wouldn't even be that new to most of the people involved. It's called a 'core charge' in the automobile service industry - anything that is highly recyclable has one to incentivize getting that recyclable thing back.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
Strange, TFA is about what is happening in labs.
And don't forget space flight. That failed spectacularly too.
Signed,
Meteorologists, global communications networks, scientists everywhere, and anyone who watches live TV.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
Are you saying I'm completely wrong, or just partially wrong?
-SR
Well, I got to give the Nazis that one. Their war effort advanced rocket technology quite a bit among other things.
-SR
CANDU has pretty solid safeguards against weaponization, but it's not like enrichment is all that difficult. Calutrons are fairly simple and old tech you can build in a garage (though you may not want to actually start processing material there if you enjoy being alive for long). You won't get amazing stuff out of them, but if all you're looking for is a uranium gun device, they'll do the job. If you're going with a plutonium based device, the synchronized, symmetric implosion is really your long pole anyway. Getting the plutonium will never be the real challenge there and an unlimited supply won't help you if it just blows itself apart prior to criticality.
CANDU designs are already prepared for MOX fuel cycles (and theoretically, they'll run on thorium as well but nobody's ever actually implemented it to the best of my knowledge), but you'll want to take that into account when actually building the plant or you'll be in for some expensive refitting later. They don't do it in Canada for the same reason we don't in the US: policy says don't do it. But they've reprocessed used fuel in Europe, Russia, Japan, and other places around the world for a long time. You can actually also feed weaponized material from decommissioned nuclear weapons into these reactors as well (a process the US Department of Energy is looking into, since we have a whole lot of that stuff sitting around now thanks to START, START II, etc).
That cuts a significant amount of your high level waste. You feed the rest into a fairly small number of fast neutron reactors. Yes, they'll be more expensive to run, but they're serving a greater purpose (turning dangerous waste into power and vastly less dangerous waste with significantly diminished time to reach non-hazardous status). House them in very safe, stable places like the US, Canada, and western Europe. We'll take what's left of the reprocessed material that the CANDU plants can't use anymore and extract most of what's left of its energy until there's just a tiny amount of waste with very little remaining energy. What remains is very easy to safely store and there's not much of it anyway.
And before you tell me the fast neutron reactors are a pipe dream of the future, EBR-II ran for 30 years (until Congress pulled its budget in 1994 - thanks GOP!) without issue. Not only did it work and actually produce electricity, but it was truly passively safe (tested in 1986 in a complete pull-the-plug test with all emergency systems offline - the physics of the design itself caused it to shut down naturally on its own in the absence of the systems that normally run it). The design was commercialized, but hasn't yet been picked up - largely due to NIMBY and the economic and political problems it creates with state and local governments. So we already have the tech developed and tested; we're merely choosing not to implement it via incompetence and ignorance.
None of this is politically feasible. It would require human beings behaving rationally and in the interests of the species as a whole. People on the right (no, not all of them) don't want to buy into the idea that fossil fuels are bad for the environment (even in cases where it's unquestionable that they are like towns buried under radioactive coal slurry) and people on the left (no, not all of them) have an irrational fear of radiation that rivals the anti-vaccine hysteria. Between that and the international cooperation it'd take, plus all the money required to get it kicked off, plus the coordination required, bureaucratic red tape to cut through, corruption to deal with, general incompetence, etc, it isn't going to happen anytime soon. But there's no technical reason we couldn't do it if we suddenly starting thinking and acting rationally in the best interests of our own species.
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
Two issues there: 1) CANDU actually is proliferation resistant (meets international standards for resistance anyway) and 2) No, India did not get it from there; they got the material from the CIRUS research reactor at Trombay that the US and Canada provided them under an agreement that it would only be used for peaceful purposes. So you're batting 1.000 somewhere, but unfortunately, this is Earth. :-)
But neither of those things really matter anyway for a simple reason: most of what you're getting out of a CANDU plant is easy to get if you have the technical understanding to actually build a working weapon out of it. If you're going for a uranium device and you want enriched uranium, build calutrons and get your uranium. They're old tech that's well understood and documented. A group of decent engineering grad students with a few hundred bucks could build one in a garage and get decent materials out of it (though anyone operating it likely wouldn't live too long). But most of what the CANDU plant is going to give you is plutonium and you aren't building a working device out of that without serious know-how. North Korea's been trying to make that work for decades and they can't do it. Plenty of others have also tried and failed many, many times. In that case, the plutonium is the easy part; making a weapon that can bring it to criticality is the challenge.
So what's the risk? A country that already has everything it needs for a bomb has one additional avenue, maybe, if they can bypass the safeguards? Nobody's joining the nuclear club because of CANDU - they're doing it because they've decided to do so and it really isn't that hard if you aren't trying to do the super cool shit.
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
My point was not that it's a politically feasible plan. My point was that it's a technically feasible plan. The fact that it requires foresight and a supermajority of human beings actually thinking and acting rationally and in the best interests of the species as a whole (i.e. it'll never happen) does not negate the fact that there is no technical impediment to successfully implementation. Further, we'd all be far better off for it. But none of that matters because people - as a whole - won't agree to do things that make sense for everyone.
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
You are saying that NOW after India used it to make nuclear weapons? Seriously?
China and a pile of other places don't give a shit about "politically feasible" so that excuse for a lack of a golden age of magic new nukes is getting a bit old.
Oh come on now, do you think the readers are really that stupid? Alex Gabbard pushed that line and the bullshit about terrorists building nukes from ash but he was getting paid to lie when he did it. It's no more real than his novels about hillbilly moonshiners.
It's as radioactive as fucking sand because that's what the stuff that becomes ash was before it ended up as impurities in coal.
You are saying that NOW after India used it to make nuclear weapons? Seriously?
Well, first of all, they didn't. They used the CIRUS research reactor in Trombay. The US and Canada gave it to them under an agreement that it would only be used for peaceful purposes.
Oh come on now, do you think the readers are really that stupid? Alex Gabbard pushed that line and the bullshit about terrorists building nukes from ash but he was getting paid to lie when he did it. It's no more real than his novels about hillbilly moonshiners.
It's as radioactive as fucking sand because that's what the stuff that becomes ash was before it ended up as impurities in coal.
I didn't say anything about building nukes from coal slurry, so that's a strawman. I made the point that coal has real, measurable impacts that one can actually see whether one subscribes to the concept of global climate change caused by human activities (such as burning coal) or not. The idea is that you can readily see severe environmental impacts from coal and oil power plants without having to get into any sort of complex interconnected open system dynamics. You can just see entire towns buried by fucking coal slurry like Kingston, TN and in Martin County, KY.
Also, coal ash is more radioactive than nuclear waste. But please, don't let facts get in the way of whatever agenda it is you're pushing. You done yet?
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
Strange, you replied to someone asking about where to get a 10,000 cycle battery with what is happening in a lab.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
Which is why I qualified it. I expect tesla has made some but does not yet know which ones.
The primary source of all that "radioactive coal slurry" hype (Alex Gabbard a former member of the administrative staff at Oak Ridge Labs) did.
It's sand that got mixed in with the plant material before coal formation so if someone is using the radioactive hype about it is a very good lie or idiot detector.
Also, from wikipedia for what it is worth:
Look at the comments on that article and about that article - it's utter fucking bullshit derived from the moonshine fiction guy. The citation is a fucking newsletter at oak ridge, circulation under a hundred. It's a lazy example of reporting by press release and Scientific American got a lot of flak for that article.
How about another source referring to a more recent Duke study? Further, coal slurry has plenty of heavy metals which are also ugly environmental contaminants that react poorly with human populations, particularly when they leech into water supplies (or just bury your town). In any event, I can't imagine anyone making the argument that it's good for humans or for the environment to have mountains of coal slurry hanging around. Outside of a coal lobbyist, I don't think anyone actually believes it's harmless.
And you have to admit the Wikipedia linked info about Shakti is pretty damn thin. An offhand comment in a publication appears to suggest that maybe possibly something somewhere could have come from Bill's father-in-law's third cousin twice removed on a stormy Tuesday...
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
An important line is:
"This means we can predict how much potential radioactivity will occur in coal ash by measuring the uranium content in the parent coal, which is easily discerned,"
Coal typically just has silicates in it and rarely has much of anything heavier - "sedimentary my dear Watson" to misquote, since heavy stuff is not so often on shorelines where vegetation is. Those uranium rich coals are rare.
So if you want a sensible discussion instead of your "radioactive coal slurry" weirdness you should consider that.
I suggest you read a bit more on the topic and you will understand why the press release from an administrator at ORNL raised so much ire when it was published in Scientific American without any bullshit checking.
You'll also get an idea why I knew not to take you seriously when you wrote about "coal slurry" - as you learn about the topic you'll see what terms are used and you'll wonder why I bothered replying instead of writing you off as an ignorant idiot fooled by a novelist who spent a bit of time pushing paper at ORNL.
I didn't say it was harmless just that the "more radioactive than nuclear waste" thing is utter bullshit. You are getting that from the PR move to try to pretend that nuclear power station waste was nothing to worry about by comparing it with coal in a ridiculous way.
I heard it from elsewhere some years ago which is why I wrote "from wikipedia for what it is worth". There was a decent book on the Indian nuclear weapons program a few years back but finding an online thing to link to is a bit more difficult. However you may recall that Turkey was blocked from buying CANDU reactors because of the fear that they would use them to make weapon materials.