What are we at right now for a fleet average -- ~25mpg? Average 12,000 mi/year, average vehicle age 9.5 yrs and growing (implying average lifespan of about 20 years). 20 * 12000 / 25 = 9,600 gallons of gasoline. So your 2 ton vehicle -- most of which will be recycled -- contrasts with 33.6 tons of gasoline, all of which ends up burned and straight into the atmosphere.
I know it's trendy to pretend that production energy consumption being left out reverses the equation (because people often used to leave production costs out), but that doesn't mean it's the case.
It gets worse: they rate electric cars in miles per gallon. "Yeah, just fill 'er up with five gallons of electricity. Premium, please!" The EPA gathered together some focus group of yokels and found that they didn't know what a kilowatt hour was, and so decided to put everything into "gallons", which is an absurd measure for electricity.
Autoignition temperature != energy of ignition. H2 = 0.017mJ. Gasoline: 0.20mJ. They're two different parameters. You can put a vial of nitroglycerine in a pot of boiling water and it won't go off (autoignition temperature = 270C -- similar to gasoline), but it only takes the tiniest amount of ignition energy to set it off.
Hydrogen is *incredibly* sensitive to being ignited by tiny static charges.
Hydrogen does indeed burn incredibly rapidly, which means that most of it burns away from the people near it.
Let me sum up my reply to your whole post this way. Do you know what you call a rapid fire?
An Explosion
Which would you rather be next to when it goes off -- a pound of gasoline or a pound of dynamite?
For a given amount of energy, you don't want it to burn quickly. Your gasoline burn victims would simply be dead had all of the energy in the fuel gone off at once.
And think about it this way: hydrogen is stored at higher pressures and is more explosive than CNG. Sometimes hydrogen proponents make these carefully demos where they punch a specific hole in the tank and ignite it under precise conditions. But in the real world, what you usually get is catastrophic failure. That sort of explosion isn't a "burn your arm if you're in the car" explosion. That's a "take down your house if the car's in the garage at the time" explosion.
It's just not an appropriate fuel for vehicles. Plus, the H2 fuel cycle is just so inefficient.
No, in enclosed spaces, hydrogen pools. It only leaks when the highest point above it is clear or slopes to the sky. When confined, it tends to leak *into* structures. For example, hydrogen pipelines must be the highest in elevation when you have several pipelines running together; otherwise, it can leak out of its pipeline and into the other pipelines and follow them to their destination, then pool there. There are all sorts of crazy regulations for dealing with hydrogen because it's both explosive and an utter PITA to handle.
My father was a refinery manager. Even with the vast amounts of oil and natural gas they had there, the proportionally small amounts of hydrogen (used for the cat crackers and hydrocrackers) led to the most horror stories.
Gasoline vapors do not pool anywhere close to the degree that hydrogen does, as gasoline vapors break down over time, are heavy, and require a very specific fuel-air mix to burn. Here, just to make it easy: how about you go compare NASA's safety handling guides for JP1 with their guide for handling hydrogen. I'll put it this way: the JP1 guide doesn't tell you to build your buildings *planning* for the roof to be blown off.
Rocket-grade peroxide (HTP) is also very dangerous, and I wouldn't recommend it for cars, either.
Gasoline requires about ten times as much energy to ignite as hydrogen. As a consequence, hydrogen management guidelines require extreme measures be taken for spark suppression, as even the tinist static spark can ignite it.
In this fire at the Rochester airport, two people were injured with some surface burns
Injured "with some surface burns"? The driver suffered second degree burns on his face. Want to see what that looks like? Link (not the same person, but the same condition). There was nobody else at the station at the time. The other person who was burned was at a Burger King -- across a large parking lot and a major road, then across the Burger King's parking lot. She was flash burned.
Had this been in a residential neighborhood instead of the outskirts of an airport, it could have been catastrophic.
Yes, petrofuel burns and smokes for a while. For a while. Hydrogen burns incredibly rapidly. You can't run away from a hydrogen fire.
And there's no new evidence, especially here, that the Hindenburg burned because of its hydrogen rather than its documented explosive material skin.
Oh, for God's sake, even the Mythbusters have debunked this one. But if you'd rather a scientific paper, here you go.Here's a nice wrapup of the whole thing.
I think one of the most damning things is Bain's own video. He has to use a freaking Jacob's ladder to ignite his skin sample, and as soon as the Jacob's ladder's energy is gone, the skin self-extinguishes.
When the Hindenburg burned, huge amounts of its unburned skin landed in pieces all over the landing site -- self-extinguished by the winds from the fire. The skin has a burn rate of centimeters per second where it can be sustained. The Hindenburg burned at a rate of *meters* per second. The amount of skin compared to the amount of hydrogen was miniscule.
Hydrogen burns in almost any fuel-air mixture -- if I remember right, it's something along the lines of 4% to 70%. It mixes with air incredibly rapidly even when not pressurized or driven by intense convection currents.
Helium blimps do not burn. Period. That's why they switched to them, even using the exact same fabrics at the time. Any skin fire would be quickly extinguished by the inert gas inside.
It's simply a fact that hydrogen is an *extremely* flammable, easy to ignite, easy to mix with air fuel. Way more than gasoline, and significantly more than CNG.
And yet Hydrogen still stores energy more densely then batteries. So you make no valid point.
Hey, a Beryllium slurry stores way more energy than gasoline. Should we all drive cars powered by burning a beryllium slurry?
The argument is a dumb one anyway. BEV ranges have been advancing much faster than H2 vehicle ranges. Today's top of the line EVs only have marginally less range than today's top of the line FCVs. They'll pass them within the next ten years. Getting more range out of an EV due to battery improvements improves generally everything else about the vehicle -- more power available, longer battery life, faster charge rates, etc. Getting more range out of an H2 vehicle *worsens* everything about it -- more dangerous pressures, more energy lost in storage, lower fill rates due to the higher pressures, etc.
And besides, when the choice is a $109k sports car which does 0-60 in 3.9 seconds, or a glorified H2 Camry (the Clarity) that costs about $300k and which can only be filled in select locations, and which takes about three times as much energy per mile -- who do you think would pick the latter?
And the Mythbusters rigged everything in favor of the skin. Remember the small-scale: when they tried having all of the hydrogen in at once, it simply exploded instantly. So they slowly injected the H2. And their scale model also had a *way* higher skin-to-volume ratio.
1) CNG is much safer than hydrogen -- lower pressures, much greater ignition energy req, much narrower fuel-air burn ratios, no DTD transition in unconfined spaces, no metal fatigue, no seeping through almost anything, etc.
2) CNG vehicles *are* a lot less save than gasoline vehicles. Even with how limited use it's gotten so far, there are tons of reports of huge CNG-vehicle accidents (mainly on CNG busses). Here's what happens when a CNG car burns versus a gasoline car. Several cars were burned by arson here. Tell me if you can spot which one was CNG.;)
Oh, but hydrogen doesn't explode or even burn! Half a million slashdotters insisted as much, and profusely insisted that the Hindenburg really burned because of a "thermite" or "rocket fuel" skin.;)
The reality is that hydrogen is an exceedingly flammable gas, much moreso than hydrocarbons, with 1/10th the ignition energy required many times the fuel-air combustible mixture range, and -- unlike hydrocarbons -- readily undergoes deflagration-to-detonation transitions in unconfined spaces. It's also extremely prone to leaks, burns largely clear, and tends to pool in fuel-air mixtures underneath overhangs. To top it all off, it's stored under immense pressure.
P.S. -- Some of the best special effects I coded were never used.:P But they're still sitting around in the code base, supported by the client -- they just never got added to any maps. For example, blowing 3d leaves that accumulate around objects, then swirl away.
But you can change flight plans drastically, even in mid flight if you really must..
Huh? How often does *that* happen? That's like saying that we shouldn't drive cars because every so often, someone will catch a disease like Ebola and drive cross-country, infecting people at every gas station along the way. But, of course, that's not the "normal" driving case, so we don't base our opinions about driving around that. Rerouting planes is not "normal" behavior. Planes leave point A and arrive at point B, as per plan, just like trains, virtually all of the time. If you have an urgent emergency on a plane, yes, you need to re-route it to the nearest airport. If the same happens on a train, you pull the train off at the next switch or simply stop it where it is if it's that urgent. Planes are far more constrained.
Airports don't cost "per mile".
Sure they do. Unless your only goal is to hop from coast to coast, you need airports at intervals all across the country.
Here's my main issue with the density argument: ever been to Japan? We've ridden all over the country on the rails. Much of it is incredibly rugged terrain. In a lot of the country, your train dives into a tunnel, then a couple minutes later emerges on the other side of the mountain and immediately onto a bridge over a ravine, then straight into another tunnel, and so forth. The cost per mile must be obscene -- at least an order of magnitude higher than the cost per mile across the Great Plains. Yet they've not only merely "managed", but they've built a wonderful system.
Here's another issue: air travel suffers equally to density problems. For example, last winter, we wanted to visit my grandfather's cousin in Cimarron, NM. We had to fly in to Amarillo and then drive 4 1/2 hours to Cimarron. We could have gotten the drive down to about 3 hours by flying in through Colorado Springs or Santa Fe. Either way, air serves these remote places poorly as well, even with our current air-focused infrastructure and rail neglect, so it's hardly an argument against rail.
I once coded for a free MMO and discovered a vulnerability in how they handled web autolinking -- you know, when you say something and it turns the text into a clickable link that will open in your web browser. At least for the unix client, they were handling it with popen (I forget how they did it for windows). Just the straight, raw, unmodified string. Talk about a huge freaking command injection target.:P But the people who ran the game were so hesitant to allow any security fixes out of fear that they might break something (yeah, I know... it drove me crazy). They just wanted me to keep coding the special effects system and not say a word of the flaw. It took me writing an exploit for it that would remove all of the files in the user's home directory (or the whole system if they ran the game as root) before they reluctantly agreed to let me patch it. And the exploit was so simple -- all you had to do was to say a particular malformed URL, it'd appear as an innocent link, and anyone who clicked it would be wiped.
They *wouldn't* let me patch lesser security issues, such as those that would actually verify that data being sent back and forth was from who it said it was, to avoid a man-in-the-middle attack. They were purely reliant on the TCP stream; that was their only "security". And they did nothing to maintain a secure channel to prevent sniffing.
Be careful with what you run on your system.:P
Much more innocently, the first thing I ever did along these lines was back in the mid/late '90s and had to do with the MUD client zMud. It had an obscure feature that would let muds embed sound effects; if the mud output a particular string, it'd interpret part of it as a path to a sound file. So I had fun SHOUTing those commands with the path to windows system sounds included and making everyone's computer who used zMud start making noise;) That was, until I got scolded by a wizard...
That's how I interpreted the GP's post. But the logical conclusion of that line of argument is that the victims might as well kill themselves if the sex offender doesn't. That's my objection to their argument (if that is what the GP meant; several other people suggest a plausible alternative, that the GP meant that the perpetrator would be less shunned if they were a murderer instead)
Plus, the weather phenomenon which caused the Russian heatwave also caused the floods in our ally, Pakistan, which are threatening to topple their government. Does he really think the US is willing to destabilize nuclear-armed Pakistan in order to give Russia a heatwave?
We do have a climate change weapon, mind you. It's called carbon dioxide. They have it, too. Both forecast and observed effects include the tendency for the polar jet to shift northward and strengthen, which is what caused their 20F+ hotter-than-average weather (and Pakistan's corresponding flooding).
Come to think of it, #4 isn't really a requirement. And you could significantly reduce the potential issues with rf bandwidth, particle transmission range, and uniqueness of particles by making extensive use of retransmitters, each one responsible for transmitting and collecting all of the data for all of the neurons a particular part of the brain -- perhaps a cubic centimeter or so -- then hard-wiring it up to one many points along the meninges for a focused, directional retransmission through the skull to numerous receivers outside it. That should effectively deal with the wireless bandwidth problem (100 billion neurons * dozens of particles per neuron * several khz * a couple bytes per element transmitted = tens of TB/s).
Slashdot Mirror
Except that they'd need a separate sticker for each location/utility in the country and they'd be obsolete within months.
What are we at right now for a fleet average -- ~25mpg? Average 12,000 mi/year, average vehicle age 9.5 yrs and growing (implying average lifespan of about 20 years). 20 * 12000 / 25 = 9,600 gallons of gasoline. So your 2 ton vehicle -- most of which will be recycled -- contrasts with 33.6 tons of gasoline, all of which ends up burned and straight into the atmosphere.
I know it's trendy to pretend that production energy consumption being left out reverses the equation (because people often used to leave production costs out), but that doesn't mean it's the case.
It gets worse: they rate electric cars in miles per gallon. "Yeah, just fill 'er up with five gallons of electricity. Premium, please!" The EPA gathered together some focus group of yokels and found that they didn't know what a kilowatt hour was, and so decided to put everything into "gallons", which is an absurd measure for electricity.
Autoignition temperature != energy of ignition. H2 = 0.017mJ. Gasoline: 0.20mJ. They're two different parameters. You can put a vial of nitroglycerine in a pot of boiling water and it won't go off (autoignition temperature = 270C -- similar to gasoline), but it only takes the tiniest amount of ignition energy to set it off.
Hydrogen is *incredibly* sensitive to being ignited by tiny static charges.
Hydrogen does indeed burn incredibly rapidly, which means that most of it burns away from the people near it.
Let me sum up my reply to your whole post this way. Do you know what you call a rapid fire?
An Explosion
Which would you rather be next to when it goes off -- a pound of gasoline or a pound of dynamite?
For a given amount of energy, you don't want it to burn quickly. Your gasoline burn victims would simply be dead had all of the energy in the fuel gone off at once.
And think about it this way: hydrogen is stored at higher pressures and is more explosive than CNG. Sometimes hydrogen proponents make these carefully demos where they punch a specific hole in the tank and ignite it under precise conditions. But in the real world, what you usually get is catastrophic failure. That sort of explosion isn't a "burn your arm if you're in the car" explosion. That's a "take down your house if the car's in the garage at the time" explosion.
It's just not an appropriate fuel for vehicles. Plus, the H2 fuel cycle is just so inefficient.
No, in enclosed spaces, hydrogen pools. It only leaks when the highest point above it is clear or slopes to the sky. When confined, it tends to leak *into* structures. For example, hydrogen pipelines must be the highest in elevation when you have several pipelines running together; otherwise, it can leak out of its pipeline and into the other pipelines and follow them to their destination, then pool there. There are all sorts of crazy regulations for dealing with hydrogen because it's both explosive and an utter PITA to handle.
My father was a refinery manager. Even with the vast amounts of oil and natural gas they had there, the proportionally small amounts of hydrogen (used for the cat crackers and hydrocrackers) led to the most horror stories.
Gasoline vapors do not pool anywhere close to the degree that hydrogen does, as gasoline vapors break down over time, are heavy, and require a very specific fuel-air mix to burn. Here, just to make it easy: how about you go compare NASA's safety handling guides for JP1 with their guide for handling hydrogen. I'll put it this way: the JP1 guide doesn't tell you to build your buildings *planning* for the roof to be blown off.
Rocket-grade peroxide (HTP) is also very dangerous, and I wouldn't recommend it for cars, either.
Gasoline requires about ten times as much energy to ignite as hydrogen. As a consequence, hydrogen management guidelines require extreme measures be taken for spark suppression, as even the tinist static spark can ignite it.
In this fire at the Rochester airport, two people were injured with some surface burns
Injured "with some surface burns"? The driver suffered second degree burns on his face. Want to see what that looks like? Link (not the same person, but the same condition). There was nobody else at the station at the time. The other person who was burned was at a Burger King -- across a large parking lot and a major road, then across the Burger King's parking lot. She was flash burned.
Had this been in a residential neighborhood instead of the outskirts of an airport, it could have been catastrophic.
Yes, petrofuel burns and smokes for a while. For a while. Hydrogen burns incredibly rapidly. You can't run away from a hydrogen fire.
And there's no new evidence, especially here, that the Hindenburg burned because of its hydrogen rather than its documented explosive material skin.
Oh, for God's sake, even the Mythbusters have debunked this one. But if you'd rather a scientific paper, here you go. Here's a nice wrapup of the whole thing.
I think one of the most damning things is Bain's own video. He has to use a freaking Jacob's ladder to ignite his skin sample, and as soon as the Jacob's ladder's energy is gone, the skin self-extinguishes.
When the Hindenburg burned, huge amounts of its unburned skin landed in pieces all over the landing site -- self-extinguished by the winds from the fire. The skin has a burn rate of centimeters per second where it can be sustained. The Hindenburg burned at a rate of *meters* per second. The amount of skin compared to the amount of hydrogen was miniscule.
Hydrogen burns in almost any fuel-air mixture -- if I remember right, it's something along the lines of 4% to 70%. It mixes with air incredibly rapidly even when not pressurized or driven by intense convection currents.
Helium blimps do not burn. Period. That's why they switched to them, even using the exact same fabrics at the time. Any skin fire would be quickly extinguished by the inert gas inside.
It's simply a fact that hydrogen is an *extremely* flammable, easy to ignite, easy to mix with air fuel. Way more than gasoline, and significantly more than CNG.
And yet Hydrogen still stores energy more densely then batteries. So you make no valid point.
Hey, a Beryllium slurry stores way more energy than gasoline. Should we all drive cars powered by burning a beryllium slurry?
The argument is a dumb one anyway. BEV ranges have been advancing much faster than H2 vehicle ranges. Today's top of the line EVs only have marginally less range than today's top of the line FCVs. They'll pass them within the next ten years. Getting more range out of an EV due to battery improvements improves generally everything else about the vehicle -- more power available, longer battery life, faster charge rates, etc. Getting more range out of an H2 vehicle *worsens* everything about it -- more dangerous pressures, more energy lost in storage, lower fill rates due to the higher pressures, etc.
And besides, when the choice is a $109k sports car which does 0-60 in 3.9 seconds, or a glorified H2 Camry (the Clarity) that costs about $300k and which can only be filled in select locations, and which takes about three times as much energy per mile -- who do you think would pick the latter?
And the Mythbusters rigged everything in favor of the skin. Remember the small-scale: when they tried having all of the hydrogen in at once, it simply exploded instantly. So they slowly injected the H2. And their scale model also had a *way* higher skin-to-volume ratio.
1) CNG is much safer than hydrogen -- lower pressures, much greater ignition energy req, much narrower fuel-air burn ratios, no DTD transition in unconfined spaces, no metal fatigue, no seeping through almost anything, etc.
2) CNG vehicles *are* a lot less save than gasoline vehicles. Even with how limited use it's gotten so far, there are tons of reports of huge CNG-vehicle accidents (mainly on CNG busses). Here's what happens when a CNG car burns versus a gasoline car. Several cars were burned by arson here. Tell me if you can spot which one was CNG. ;)
Oh, but hydrogen doesn't explode or even burn! Half a million slashdotters insisted as much, and profusely insisted that the Hindenburg really burned because of a "thermite" or "rocket fuel" skin. ;)
The reality is that hydrogen is an exceedingly flammable gas, much moreso than hydrocarbons, with 1/10th the ignition energy required many times the fuel-air combustible mixture range, and -- unlike hydrocarbons -- readily undergoes deflagration-to-detonation transitions in unconfined spaces. It's also extremely prone to leaks, burns largely clear, and tends to pool in fuel-air mixtures underneath overhangs. To top it all off, it's stored under immense pressure.
I'm sure that the government would be more than happy to receive the donation of traffic lights.
So let me get this straight. The goal is to spend your money on catching speeders rather than installing traffic lights? Really?
Bingo. ;)
P.S. -- Some of the best special effects I coded were never used. :P But they're still sitting around in the code base, supported by the client -- they just never got added to any maps. For example, blowing 3d leaves that accumulate around objects, then swirl away.
But you can change flight plans drastically, even in mid flight if you really must..
Huh? How often does *that* happen? That's like saying that we shouldn't drive cars because every so often, someone will catch a disease like Ebola and drive cross-country, infecting people at every gas station along the way. But, of course, that's not the "normal" driving case, so we don't base our opinions about driving around that. Rerouting planes is not "normal" behavior. Planes leave point A and arrive at point B, as per plan, just like trains, virtually all of the time. If you have an urgent emergency on a plane, yes, you need to re-route it to the nearest airport. If the same happens on a train, you pull the train off at the next switch or simply stop it where it is if it's that urgent. Planes are far more constrained.
Airports don't cost "per mile".
Sure they do. Unless your only goal is to hop from coast to coast, you need airports at intervals all across the country.
Here's my main issue with the density argument: ever been to Japan? We've ridden all over the country on the rails. Much of it is incredibly rugged terrain. In a lot of the country, your train dives into a tunnel, then a couple minutes later emerges on the other side of the mountain and immediately onto a bridge over a ravine, then straight into another tunnel, and so forth. The cost per mile must be obscene -- at least an order of magnitude higher than the cost per mile across the Great Plains. Yet they've not only merely "managed", but they've built a wonderful system.
Here's another issue: air travel suffers equally to density problems. For example, last winter, we wanted to visit my grandfather's cousin in Cimarron, NM. We had to fly in to Amarillo and then drive 4 1/2 hours to Cimarron. We could have gotten the drive down to about 3 hours by flying in through Colorado Springs or Santa Fe. Either way, air serves these remote places poorly as well, even with our current air-focused infrastructure and rail neglect, so it's hardly an argument against rail.
I once coded for a free MMO and discovered a vulnerability in how they handled web autolinking -- you know, when you say something and it turns the text into a clickable link that will open in your web browser. At least for the unix client, they were handling it with popen (I forget how they did it for windows). Just the straight, raw, unmodified string. Talk about a huge freaking command injection target. :P But the people who ran the game were so hesitant to allow any security fixes out of fear that they might break something (yeah, I know... it drove me crazy). They just wanted me to keep coding the special effects system and not say a word of the flaw. It took me writing an exploit for it that would remove all of the files in the user's home directory (or the whole system if they ran the game as root) before they reluctantly agreed to let me patch it. And the exploit was so simple -- all you had to do was to say a particular malformed URL, it'd appear as an innocent link, and anyone who clicked it would be wiped.
They *wouldn't* let me patch lesser security issues, such as those that would actually verify that data being sent back and forth was from who it said it was, to avoid a man-in-the-middle attack. They were purely reliant on the TCP stream; that was their only "security". And they did nothing to maintain a secure channel to prevent sniffing.
Be careful with what you run on your system. :P
Much more innocently, the first thing I ever did along these lines was back in the mid/late '90s and had to do with the MUD client zMud. It had an obscure feature that would let muds embed sound effects; if the mud output a particular string, it'd interpret part of it as a path to a sound file. So I had fun SHOUTing those commands with the path to windows system sounds included and making everyone's computer who used zMud start making noise ;) That was, until I got scolded by a wizard...
That's how I interpreted the GP's post. But the logical conclusion of that line of argument is that the victims might as well kill themselves if the sex offender doesn't. That's my objection to their argument (if that is what the GP meant; several other people suggest a plausible alternative, that the GP meant that the perpetrator would be less shunned if they were a murderer instead)
So you're saying that people who've been victims of sex crimes would be better off if they committed suicide?
Plus, the weather phenomenon which caused the Russian heatwave also caused the floods in our ally, Pakistan, which are threatening to topple their government. Does he really think the US is willing to destabilize nuclear-armed Pakistan in order to give Russia a heatwave?
We do have a climate change weapon, mind you. It's called carbon dioxide. They have it, too. Both forecast and observed effects include the tendency for the polar jet to shift northward and strengthen, which is what caused their 20F+ hotter-than-average weather (and Pakistan's corresponding flooding).
Come to think of it, #4 isn't really a requirement. And you could significantly reduce the potential issues with rf bandwidth, particle transmission range, and uniqueness of particles by making extensive use of retransmitters, each one responsible for transmitting and collecting all of the data for all of the neurons a particular part of the brain -- perhaps a cubic centimeter or so -- then hard-wiring it up to one many points along the meninges for a focused, directional retransmission through the skull to numerous receivers outside it. That should effectively deal with the wireless bandwidth problem (100 billion neurons * dozens of particles per neuron * several khz * a couple bytes per element transmitted = tens of TB/s).