I literally don't have the time to look up all of the vehicle curb weights right now (I've done it on many other threads), but just as an example: Audi A4 is 3626 pounds base curb weight (1644kg), not 1295. 318i is a smaller vehicle than Model 3, and poorer performing. Even the Mercedes doesn't perform as well as the Model 3 in its base version.
When people think that getting 400 miles of range from a vehicle after one hour of charging, and consider this an "improvement", have a mental block on reality. I can "charge" my Ford truck in 5 minutes, and get about 350 miles from that.
Yes, versus a couple seconds. Why you want to have to spend 5+ minutes detouring to a gas station, in whatever weather, paying high prices and breathing in carcinogenic evaporating gas drip fumes, rather than spending a couple seconds plugging in in the comfort of your own home, is beyond me.
You clearly seem to only want to talk about long trips rather than your everyday life. Which is silly. But let's do that.
* Trips shorter than the vehicle's range take.... a couple seconds to charge. Just a plug-in at the other end.
* Trips a bit shorter than double the vehicle's range only take a single stop en route. We're now getting to the point of a half day's driving.
* Only in "whole day driving" trips does the charge speed have a relevant effect on trip time.
Except that, not really - unless you're driving like you're not supposed to. There's a reason why, for example, that European commercial drivers are legally required to have at least 45 minutes of breaks for every 4 1/2 hours of driving (split up as they choose) and can lose their license if they don't: it's not safe to drive all day with no or minimal stops. You're supposed to stop to get out and stretch / walk around a bit, to eat, to use the restroom, etc. At 420mph, a half hour meal break is 210 miles (three hours driving). At 700-800mph? Much less.
But top reiterate: long trips are the exception for the vast majority of people, not the rule. In their everyday lives, EVs take vastly less of your time.
Where it matters though is that I'd be tied to the range of my car on a single "charge" unless I can find a place to fill up.
Welcome to late 2017, where global fast charging networks are a thing.
With so much of our electricity from natural gas it seems logical to me to spend the money on getting the best of both worlds from natural gas.
It's not. Power plants burn natural gas over twice as efficiently as a NG car (transmission / distribution / battery / motor losses are each minimal), emit much less per unit power, and buy the gas for a lot cheaper than you do at home. Natural gas also is a minority of your power generation (a large minority, but still a minority).
People tend to park their cars at night and drive when the sun shines.
It depends entirely on what type of charging station you're talking about. Even if you drive through a typical suburban neighborhood during the day and you'll see lots of cars out, and that's ignoring those in garages. But beyond that, there's also workplace charging, charging at stores / malls, charging at fast chargers (with battery buffers), and so on, all of which are generally done during the day.
To accommodate this means charging up a battery during the day and then using this battery at night to charge the battery in the car.
Are you under the mistaken impression that most people with solar installs are off-grid?
Grid demand is highest during the day, lower at night. If you're providing excess power during the day and consuming more than usual at night, you're helping the grid.
I would like to see a source for the average weight you compare to. Very few cars weigh more than 1600kg, typically only the large engine models of large cars.
That's precisely the point - the larger engine models. Most entry-level luxury vehicles - your BMW 3-series, Audi A4, Mercedes 350, etc - come in many variants. The lowest power gasoline versions? Yeah, they're usually around 1600kg. But when you start getting into the high power engine options, the TDIs, the hybrids, and on and on, you start adding a couple hundred kilograms.
I try to be fair. For example, I don't say "it takes 1 minute to fill a gasoline car" because you have to factor in the time detouring to the station, decelerating, pulling into the pump, getting out, paying, waiting for confirmation, taking the gas cap off, getting the pump, then filling, then doing most of those steps in reverse to get back en route and up to speed toward your actual destination. Which makes gasoline filling times more like 5+ minutes. But if you're going to be realistic about all gasoline times, you also need to be realistic about all charging times, not just the actual time to connect the charge cable.
(That said, 10 seconds is probably still too pessimistic on the EV side;) )
Except that they don't take an evening to charge. The Model 3, for example, charges at about 420 mph in the bottom half of its SoC on Tesla superchargers. And according to EPA docs it's capable of taking up to 525A, which is more like 700-800mph peak.
Yes, they take an evening to charge at home, but what does that matter? You take ten seconds to plug in, and then you don't think any more about it; your car is full the next morning.
As for weight: the Model 3 SR is slightly lighter than average for its class. The LR is heavier than average but far from the heaviest. Either way, there's nothing excessively heavy about them.
Ah, got it. So 1/2 to 1/3rd the wall-to-wheels efficiency of an EV isn't bad enough for you; you want 1/5th the wall-to-wheels efficiency with a hydrogen ICE.
That's Jalopnik's spin. Which is not at all what it says in the Reuters source. The Reuters source says nothing about difficulty to match the (rather meager) 10-40% growth in nickel output required by 2025. It says that only half of nickel producers will be able to cash in on it.
Heck, the article actually has the opposite tone to Jalopnik's spin: it's full of discussion of nickel miners with mines shutdown or about to go bankrupt due to insufficient demand / too low market price, hoping that the increased demand for nickel from battery manufacturers will allow them to stay open / reopen closed mines.
Within a few weeks, BHP unveiled plans to retool its Nickel West division to start shipping nickel to battery manufacturers beginning in April 2019.
The announcement marked a turnaround for Nickel West, which two years ago was in its death throes, with its workforce of 2,000 told that their jobs would end in 2019.
Eduard Haegel, division chief of Nickel West, expects demand for electric vehicle batteries to account for about 90 percent of the division’s annual output of 100,000 tonnes within the next six years.
Meanwhile, Vale is looking for a partner in its loss-making New Caledonia nickel complex. It has been in talks with the Chinese battery maker GEM Co, the Financial Times reported.
“If we are not successful, we’ll have to face the reality, which is this operation is holding the company back,” Luciano Siani Pires, Vale’s chief financial officer, said, referring to the New Caledonian business.
Plants already shut may get a second chance, too.
Two with shots at restarting are Brazil’s Votorantim Metais, and First Quantum Minerals’s Ravensthorpe in Australia, which at today’s nickel prices cannot compete but could be profitable if the market continues to climb.
It's worse than that; neither of Jalopnik's "sources" make the claim that "We May Not Have Enough Minerals To Even Meet Electric Car Demand". Both of the sources are very upbeat about the market prospects, yet Jalopnik (which has long had an anti-EV lean, and particularly anti-Tesla) turns it into a doom story.
More to the point, the sources say just the opposite of what Jalopnik is claiming. To not put too fine of a point on it:
UBS estimates that 15 million electric vehicles will be on the road by 2025, lifting nickel demand by 300,000-900,000 tonnes, or by 10-40 percent of the current market.
Got that? In 7 years, nickel supply only needs to grow by 10-40%. Which is nothing. I mean, great if you're a nickel mining company, but not exactly the plot of a post-apocalyptic movie.
The Bloomberg article about cobalt, by contrast, was about how the rise in cobalt demand is bringing life back into a dying town. A feel-good story about the current market which, again, Jalopnik turned into doom.
Here's the basic fact: cobalt is found pretty much everywhere nickel and copper are. In most places, they don't bother to recover it because the market demand hasn't been high enough; it just gets thrown out in the tailings. As the demand and price rise (and EVs manufacturers can easily outspend almost all other demand sources for cobalt, because that ~15% in their cathodes makes so much of a difference), the only thing that has to happen is the addition of more recovery processes to existing copper and nickel mines. Most cobalt today comes from the Congo because their nickel-copper ores have the highest cobalt fractions (although contrary to popular myth, under 20% of the Congo's cobalt comes from "artisinal" mines; most come from big mines from international firms which use modern equipment and processes). But nickel-copper ores pretty much anywhere else on Earth can also recover cobalt, and will to whatever extent is needed to meet demand (in addition to the new demand launching a new wave of cobalt exploration, like that which is happening near the town of Cobalt).
How price sensitive are li-ion batteries to cobalt? Let's ignore, as ShanghaiBill mentioned, that there are entire chemistries that use no cobalt. Tesla's batteries have 0,22kg per kWh. Cobalt costs $60/kg (and this is during a time when speculators are trying to snatch up supply, so there's been a price spike). So that's $13,2 per kWh. Tesla's batteries currently cost about $180 per kWh; their primary goal is to get batteries down to $100/kWh. So although cobalt is the rarest element that goes into their batteries, it's still not that expensive of a component compared to what they can sell the batteries for.
The GEO landings are much harder than the LEO ones. A lot more energy in the first stage. But the refinements continue to make it easier. Also, eventually Falcon Heavy is going to be taking over the more marginal launches from Falcon 9.
For my house I'm looking at pozzolonic cement. You still have to use a lot of portland cement, but not as much.
From my view, though, the most "green" way you can build is to build to last. The difference between environmental footprints of a house that needs to be rebuilt every 50 years and one that needs to be rebuilt every 500 - only "refurbished" inside every few decades - is immense. While carbonation spells the doom of steel rebar, it's actually good for alternatives, such as FRP rebar. All of that CO2 emitted during the creation of portland cement will end up recaptured, back to limestone, for most of the house's lifespan. And that's nothing but a good thing.
There's lots of effects that you generally wouldn't think of. For example, as someone who's working on engineering a house to last many hundreds of years, one thing that's key to avoid is the key longevity limitation of traditional concrete: carbon dioxide slowly seeps into the concrete, turning calcium hydroxide to calcium carbonate (limestone) and thus lowering its pH; when the pH drops too much at the steel rebar, it no longer protects it, it rusts, increases greatly in volume, and the concrete spalls out. So I have to avoid steel rebar.
Now, most buildings aren't engineered for such long lifespans, and so they include steel rebar, with standard calculations on how long it will last relative to how deep it is within the concrete, local climactic conditions, and so forth, to meet a preset target lifespan. But as the CO2 level in the atmosphere rises, the rate at which CO2 reacts with concrete increases; this affects every concrete structure on Earth. The average building can expect its lifespan to be cut short 15-20 years in a "business as usual" CO2 scenario.
Spend fuel casks cannot 'leak' because they contain no liquid.
That's like arguing that a pile of salt won't leak away when you pour water on it because the salt "contains no liquid".
Nobody is talking about the waste being liquid, the concerns are about leaching - which is why dry storage casks exist in the first place. Because the fact that fuel rods have the potential to leach over long periods is not just a hypothetical. Zircalloy cladding is great, until it suddenly isn't (sheer, creep, galvanic corrosion, stress rupture, oxidization-aiding contaminants like lithium, etc). Cladding fails sometimes in operation, and it will also randomly fail during storage (assuming it's even intact to begin with)
This is why a mountain is a good choice, as groundwater from above is naturally diverted.
This is nonsense. Unless there is a waterproof geological trap, water will leak through the mountain. Impermeable bedrock is the exception, not the rule.
and then carrying some trace amounts of waste product as it migrates downward.
And said wastes are toxic in vanishingly small quantities, so it's not some "laugh it off" scenario; the LD50s can be less than a billionth of a gram, let alone the effect threshold. Furthermore, if you actually get a situation of heavy corrosion and leaching of fuel rods, you have the potential for a lot more than just "trace" amounts.
. Furthermore, a waterproof layer over the storage area
And what's your plan for ensuring that it stays waterproof, exactly? You know what the lifespan on a typical geomembrane is? About 20 years or so. We try to do better with modified bitumen membranes, but when you're talking such long time scales... who the bloody heck knows?
Yeah, the heat management system in Teslas is superb. And they keep coming up with more tricks to make it even better. Example: the Model 3 has no battery pack heater. Wait, isn't that a step backward? Well, no: what they do instead is deliberately run the motor very inefficiently (even when at a stop), creating tons of waste heat in the motor, and then the thermal management system shunts that to the battery pack;)
Between the battery pack, the drive unit, the cabin heater, the radiator, and the compressor, they can shunt heat between any of them, as needed. As for the radiator, it has louvres and some powerful fans. Normally the louvres stay shut to keep the drag down, but when supercharging or sprinting on a track, the louvres open and the fans come on for additional cooling. This lets them get rid of heat fast.
According to the new EPA docs, Model 3's pack can take 525A. It's a nominal 400V, which would imply 210kW - although one expects them only to be able to take that much at lower SoCs, maybe 180kW. But still well more than any charger in that voltage range can deliver. The super-rare "350kW" CCS chargers are only 350A (you can only use the "350kW" if you can charge at 1000V, which nobody today can). Tesla Superchargers are about the same current (but far more common). And Model 3 is also one of the most efficient EVs out there - only a tiny bit more energy consumption per kilometer than the Prius Prime and Ioniq (both 4 seaters, vs. the Model 3's five seats), and way less than the dozen or so other major PHEVs and EVs on the roads today. So high charging powers plus low power-per-mile requirements...
Tesla has owned the Fremont factory since 2010. It's now late 2017. Funny that in all this time UAW never saw fit to hold a vote on unionization in this supposedly horrible, unfair work environment, and has instead chosen to wage a PR campaign instead.
Neither - it uses earth as an inner form, to be removed by a backhoe afterward. There is no outer form except for where the walls are steep. In order to anchor the outer form to the interior we either have to use wires attached to the foundation, or to shotcrete anchors to the earth form.
Does it have multiple levels?
"Sort of".;) The basic shape can be divided into what the engineer has taken to calling "the worm" (garage, hallway and some small rooms that branch off of it) and two "domes" - a small one that makes up the guest wing and is divided into two rooms, and a big open floor plan dome that makes up the living room, kitchen, and master bedroom. The "worm" starts at the garage, descends deeper into the ground the further into the house you get, so each room branched off of it is successively lower, and ends at the guest wing dome. At the main dome, you can either go up or down from the hallway; down is the base of the dome (living room / kitchen), while up is a wooden loft built inside the dome (master bedroom). I picked up a tiny one-person bucket elevator for next to nothing from a person who was contracted to tear down an old library, so I'll be incorporating that in as well:)
Dividing the house into simple shapes helps the engineers. They can treat the worm as an arch that just varies in height and width, while they can treat the domes as isolated structures, with a self-supporting interconnect. Of course, to keep it this simple they have to bear the earth loads, since half the house is underground (it's built on the edge of a canyon, so you've got big windows on the canyon side, but you don't see it from the other side because the ground continues onto the "roof"). To take the earth loads (rather than having to basically angle the whole house against the ground!) the engineer came up with the idea to have a concrete "beam" up against the earth, which transfers the loads into perpendicular internal walls that act as buttresses.
(Gotta love having a good engineer!:) )
How about the roof (if it isn't a dome), is that concrete?
The whole loadbearing structure is concrete. For aesthetics, we're looking at concreting in rocks (aka, the rocks would be on the surface of the earth mould and thus get concreted in when the concrete is poured). The engineer thinks we'll probably have to drill and/or glue some concrete anchors onto the rocks; I guess we'll find out. Hopefully not drill, that'd take an awfully long time;) Anyway, once the mould is is cleared out, I'll be using high pressure water to remove excess cement off the rocks. Should create a very nice cave feel:) The bath is going to just be a low point in the foundation, with rocks concreted into it (the inspiration is Grjótagjá, up north - my favourite geothermal cave bath:) ))
I've been toying with the idea of designing/building an extremely long lasting, low maintenance home off the grid in the back woods
Good for you! I wish more people would pay attention to the whole "long lasting" aspect. People talk about "eco homes" - there's nothing "ecological" about having to rebuild a house every couple decades. If you build a house and it lasts hundreds or even thousands of years, it's saving a huge amount of resources versus a house that has to be rebuilt over and over again.
You of course have to "futureproof" it as best as you can. E.g. just in the
1) Loans are amortized capital costs. Capital costs being the overwhelming majority of the cost of wind turbines. If you weren't paying off the capital costs, you'd be getting power for nearly free.
2) It doesn't matter what you think. They've found that the extra power they get justifies the cost of the upgrade. That doesn't even imply that the older technology's economics are bad, just that the new technology's are even better.
Interestingly enough, "rush hour traffic" is what current Level 2 systems are best at. Not at picking lanes, but at everything else. Lots of cars to help them stay centred in the lane even when lane markers are bad, slow speeds, etc, etc. It doesn't mean you can ignore the road, but it does mean less having to constantly focus on a line of unmoving cars to avoid the situation where if you don't start moving as soon as the car ahead of you does, people behind you get mad and start honking.
Should autonomous cars mature in my lifetime, I'm going to laugh so hard when there's the first widespread autonomous car hack. Suddenly, a million vehicles start converging on a single point, blocking all traffic in the entire region...
I'm not sure about "lifetime", but "any time soon"? Agreed. And I say this as a big Tesla fan. But the edge cases are just way too numerous, and not something you can just sweep on the rug with "oh, but it'll be safer because it never gets distracted...." Yeah, try telling that to the family of the person you just killed in a situation that a human could have easily avoided.
Sorry, I know, Leaf is an easy punching bag;) It's overly simplified powertrain hurts it in a lot of other ways too, many of which aren't as obvious. For example, Leafs lose a lot of range in the winter, but Teslas only lose 10-20% (assuming dry pavement in both cases). Electric powertrains don't give off a ton of waste heat, but each component does give off a meaningful amount, and being able to capture it from one place and shunt it to another is hugely advantageous in adverse weather conditions.
But, the Leaf did what it's supposed to do: gave Nissan a way to roll out EVs in significant numbers quickly at an affordable price point. Now, however, it's time for that pricepoint to switch to properly managed EV powertrains.;)
More to the point, it's basically a digital spirograph (remember those?:) ). Which, the question it raises to me is... why did it take so long before someone thought to make a digital spirograph?
Model 3s aren't double the price. They're about the same price for the same range (although you can add on more range and a lot more features, like dual motor AWD, performance packages, etc).
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I brought it up? The 3-series comparable to the Model 3 is the 330i, not the 318i. Which has a curb weight if 1618kg.
I literally don't have the time to look up all of the vehicle curb weights right now (I've done it on many other threads), but just as an example: Audi A4 is 3626 pounds base curb weight (1644kg), not 1295. 318i is a smaller vehicle than Model 3, and poorer performing. Even the Mercedes doesn't perform as well as the Model 3 in its base version.
Yes, versus a couple seconds. Why you want to have to spend 5+ minutes detouring to a gas station, in whatever weather, paying high prices and breathing in carcinogenic evaporating gas drip fumes, rather than spending a couple seconds plugging in in the comfort of your own home, is beyond me.
You clearly seem to only want to talk about long trips rather than your everyday life. Which is silly. But let's do that.
* Trips shorter than the vehicle's range take.... a couple seconds to charge. Just a plug-in at the other end.
* Trips a bit shorter than double the vehicle's range only take a single stop en route. We're now getting to the point of a half day's driving.
* Only in "whole day driving" trips does the charge speed have a relevant effect on trip time.
Except that, not really - unless you're driving like you're not supposed to. There's a reason why, for example, that European commercial drivers are legally required to have at least 45 minutes of breaks for every 4 1/2 hours of driving (split up as they choose) and can lose their license if they don't: it's not safe to drive all day with no or minimal stops. You're supposed to stop to get out and stretch / walk around a bit, to eat, to use the restroom, etc. At 420mph, a half hour meal break is 210 miles (three hours driving). At 700-800mph? Much less.
But top reiterate: long trips are the exception for the vast majority of people, not the rule. In their everyday lives, EVs take vastly less of your time.
Welcome to late 2017, where global fast charging networks are a thing.
It's not. Power plants burn natural gas over twice as efficiently as a NG car (transmission / distribution / battery / motor losses are each minimal), emit much less per unit power, and buy the gas for a lot cheaper than you do at home. Natural gas also is a minority of your power generation (a large minority, but still a minority).
It depends entirely on what type of charging station you're talking about. Even if you drive through a typical suburban neighborhood during the day and you'll see lots of cars out, and that's ignoring those in garages. But beyond that, there's also workplace charging, charging at stores / malls, charging at fast chargers (with battery buffers), and so on, all of which are generally done during the day.
Are you under the mistaken impression that most people with solar installs are off-grid?
Grid demand is highest during the day, lower at night. If you're providing excess power during the day and consuming more than usual at night, you're helping the grid.
That's precisely the point - the larger engine models. Most entry-level luxury vehicles - your BMW 3-series, Audi A4, Mercedes 350, etc - come in many variants. The lowest power gasoline versions? Yeah, they're usually around 1600kg. But when you start getting into the high power engine options, the TDIs, the hybrids, and on and on, you start adding a couple hundred kilograms.
I try to be fair. For example, I don't say "it takes 1 minute to fill a gasoline car" because you have to factor in the time detouring to the station, decelerating, pulling into the pump, getting out, paying, waiting for confirmation, taking the gas cap off, getting the pump, then filling, then doing most of those steps in reverse to get back en route and up to speed toward your actual destination. Which makes gasoline filling times more like 5+ minutes. But if you're going to be realistic about all gasoline times, you also need to be realistic about all charging times, not just the actual time to connect the charge cable.
(That said, 10 seconds is probably still too pessimistic on the EV side ;) )
Except that they don't take an evening to charge. The Model 3, for example, charges at about 420 mph in the bottom half of its SoC on Tesla superchargers. And according to EPA docs it's capable of taking up to 525A, which is more like 700-800mph peak.
Yes, they take an evening to charge at home, but what does that matter? You take ten seconds to plug in, and then you don't think any more about it; your car is full the next morning.
As for weight: the Model 3 SR is slightly lighter than average for its class. The LR is heavier than average but far from the heaviest. Either way, there's nothing excessively heavy about them.
Ah, got it. So 1/2 to 1/3rd the wall-to-wheels efficiency of an EV isn't bad enough for you; you want 1/5th the wall-to-wheels efficiency with a hydrogen ICE.
That's Jalopnik's spin. Which is not at all what it says in the Reuters source. The Reuters source says nothing about difficulty to match the (rather meager) 10-40% growth in nickel output required by 2025. It says that only half of nickel producers will be able to cash in on it.
Heck, the article actually has the opposite tone to Jalopnik's spin: it's full of discussion of nickel miners with mines shutdown or about to go bankrupt due to insufficient demand / too low market price, hoping that the increased demand for nickel from battery manufacturers will allow them to stay open / reopen closed mines.
Par for the course for Jalopnik, mind you.
It's worse than that; neither of Jalopnik's "sources" make the claim that "We May Not Have Enough Minerals To Even Meet Electric Car Demand". Both of the sources are very upbeat about the market prospects, yet Jalopnik (which has long had an anti-EV lean, and particularly anti-Tesla) turns it into a doom story.
More to the point, the sources say just the opposite of what Jalopnik is claiming. To not put too fine of a point on it:
Got that? In 7 years, nickel supply only needs to grow by 10-40%. Which is nothing. I mean, great if you're a nickel mining company, but not exactly the plot of a post-apocalyptic movie.
The Bloomberg article about cobalt, by contrast, was about how the rise in cobalt demand is bringing life back into a dying town. A feel-good story about the current market which, again, Jalopnik turned into doom.
Here's the basic fact: cobalt is found pretty much everywhere nickel and copper are. In most places, they don't bother to recover it because the market demand hasn't been high enough; it just gets thrown out in the tailings. As the demand and price rise (and EVs manufacturers can easily outspend almost all other demand sources for cobalt, because that ~15% in their cathodes makes so much of a difference), the only thing that has to happen is the addition of more recovery processes to existing copper and nickel mines. Most cobalt today comes from the Congo because their nickel-copper ores have the highest cobalt fractions (although contrary to popular myth, under 20% of the Congo's cobalt comes from "artisinal" mines; most come from big mines from international firms which use modern equipment and processes). But nickel-copper ores pretty much anywhere else on Earth can also recover cobalt, and will to whatever extent is needed to meet demand (in addition to the new demand launching a new wave of cobalt exploration, like that which is happening near the town of Cobalt).
How price sensitive are li-ion batteries to cobalt? Let's ignore, as ShanghaiBill mentioned, that there are entire chemistries that use no cobalt. Tesla's batteries have 0,22kg per kWh. Cobalt costs $60/kg (and this is during a time when speculators are trying to snatch up supply, so there's been a price spike). So that's $13,2 per kWh. Tesla's batteries currently cost about $180 per kWh; their primary goal is to get batteries down to $100/kWh. So although cobalt is the rarest element that goes into their batteries, it's still not that expensive of a component compared to what they can sell the batteries for.
The GEO landings are much harder than the LEO ones. A lot more energy in the first stage. But the refinements continue to make it easier. Also, eventually Falcon Heavy is going to be taking over the more marginal launches from Falcon 9.
For my house I'm looking at pozzolonic cement. You still have to use a lot of portland cement, but not as much.
From my view, though, the most "green" way you can build is to build to last. The difference between environmental footprints of a house that needs to be rebuilt every 50 years and one that needs to be rebuilt every 500 - only "refurbished" inside every few decades - is immense. While carbonation spells the doom of steel rebar, it's actually good for alternatives, such as FRP rebar. All of that CO2 emitted during the creation of portland cement will end up recaptured, back to limestone, for most of the house's lifespan. And that's nothing but a good thing.
There's lots of effects that you generally wouldn't think of. For example, as someone who's working on engineering a house to last many hundreds of years, one thing that's key to avoid is the key longevity limitation of traditional concrete: carbon dioxide slowly seeps into the concrete, turning calcium hydroxide to calcium carbonate (limestone) and thus lowering its pH; when the pH drops too much at the steel rebar, it no longer protects it, it rusts, increases greatly in volume, and the concrete spalls out. So I have to avoid steel rebar.
Now, most buildings aren't engineered for such long lifespans, and so they include steel rebar, with standard calculations on how long it will last relative to how deep it is within the concrete, local climactic conditions, and so forth, to meet a preset target lifespan. But as the CO2 level in the atmosphere rises, the rate at which CO2 reacts with concrete increases; this affects every concrete structure on Earth. The average building can expect its lifespan to be cut short 15-20 years in a "business as usual" CO2 scenario.
That's like arguing that a pile of salt won't leak away when you pour water on it because the salt "contains no liquid".
Nobody is talking about the waste being liquid, the concerns are about leaching - which is why dry storage casks exist in the first place. Because the fact that fuel rods have the potential to leach over long periods is not just a hypothetical. Zircalloy cladding is great, until it suddenly isn't (sheer, creep, galvanic corrosion, stress rupture, oxidization-aiding contaminants like lithium, etc). Cladding fails sometimes in operation, and it will also randomly fail during storage (assuming it's even intact to begin with)
This is nonsense. Unless there is a waterproof geological trap, water will leak through the mountain. Impermeable bedrock is the exception, not the rule.
And said wastes are toxic in vanishingly small quantities, so it's not some "laugh it off" scenario; the LD50s can be less than a billionth of a gram, let alone the effect threshold. Furthermore, if you actually get a situation of heavy corrosion and leaching of fuel rods, you have the potential for a lot more than just "trace" amounts.
And what's your plan for ensuring that it stays waterproof, exactly? You know what the lifespan on a typical geomembrane is? About 20 years or so. We try to do better with modified bitumen membranes, but when you're talking such long time scales... who the bloody heck knows?
Yeah, the heat management system in Teslas is superb. And they keep coming up with more tricks to make it even better. Example: the Model 3 has no battery pack heater. Wait, isn't that a step backward? Well, no: what they do instead is deliberately run the motor very inefficiently (even when at a stop), creating tons of waste heat in the motor, and then the thermal management system shunts that to the battery pack ;)
Between the battery pack, the drive unit, the cabin heater, the radiator, and the compressor, they can shunt heat between any of them, as needed. As for the radiator, it has louvres and some powerful fans. Normally the louvres stay shut to keep the drag down, but when supercharging or sprinting on a track, the louvres open and the fans come on for additional cooling. This lets them get rid of heat fast.
According to the new EPA docs, Model 3's pack can take 525A. It's a nominal 400V, which would imply 210kW - although one expects them only to be able to take that much at lower SoCs, maybe 180kW. But still well more than any charger in that voltage range can deliver. The super-rare "350kW" CCS chargers are only 350A (you can only use the "350kW" if you can charge at 1000V, which nobody today can). Tesla Superchargers are about the same current (but far more common). And Model 3 is also one of the most efficient EVs out there - only a tiny bit more energy consumption per kilometer than the Prius Prime and Ioniq (both 4 seaters, vs. the Model 3's five seats), and way less than the dozen or so other major PHEVs and EVs on the roads today. So high charging powers plus low power-per-mile requirements...
What a beast :) I can't wait to get mine.
Yes, I'm sure people have been abused for 7 1/2 years but are just now "recognizing" it.
Tesla has owned the Fremont factory since 2010. It's now late 2017. Funny that in all this time UAW never saw fit to hold a vote on unionization in this supposedly horrible, unfair work environment, and has instead chosen to wage a PR campaign instead.
Neither - it uses earth as an inner form, to be removed by a backhoe afterward. There is no outer form except for where the walls are steep. In order to anchor the outer form to the interior we either have to use wires attached to the foundation, or to shotcrete anchors to the earth form.
"Sort of". ;) The basic shape can be divided into what the engineer has taken to calling "the worm" (garage, hallway and some small rooms that branch off of it) and two "domes" - a small one that makes up the guest wing and is divided into two rooms, and a big open floor plan dome that makes up the living room, kitchen, and master bedroom. The "worm" starts at the garage, descends deeper into the ground the further into the house you get, so each room branched off of it is successively lower, and ends at the guest wing dome. At the main dome, you can either go up or down from the hallway; down is the base of the dome (living room / kitchen), while up is a wooden loft built inside the dome (master bedroom). I picked up a tiny one-person bucket elevator for next to nothing from a person who was contracted to tear down an old library, so I'll be incorporating that in as well :)
Dividing the house into simple shapes helps the engineers. They can treat the worm as an arch that just varies in height and width, while they can treat the domes as isolated structures, with a self-supporting interconnect. Of course, to keep it this simple they have to bear the earth loads, since half the house is underground (it's built on the edge of a canyon, so you've got big windows on the canyon side, but you don't see it from the other side because the ground continues onto the "roof"). To take the earth loads (rather than having to basically angle the whole house against the ground!) the engineer came up with the idea to have a concrete "beam" up against the earth, which transfers the loads into perpendicular internal walls that act as buttresses.
(Gotta love having a good engineer! :) )
The whole loadbearing structure is concrete. For aesthetics, we're looking at concreting in rocks (aka, the rocks would be on the surface of the earth mould and thus get concreted in when the concrete is poured). The engineer thinks we'll probably have to drill and/or glue some concrete anchors onto the rocks; I guess we'll find out. Hopefully not drill, that'd take an awfully long time ;) Anyway, once the mould is is cleared out, I'll be using high pressure water to remove excess cement off the rocks. Should create a very nice cave feel :) The bath is going to just be a low point in the foundation, with rocks concreted into it (the inspiration is Grjótagjá, up north - my favourite geothermal cave bath :) ))
Good for you! I wish more people would pay attention to the whole "long lasting" aspect. People talk about "eco homes" - there's nothing "ecological" about having to rebuild a house every couple decades. If you build a house and it lasts hundreds or even thousands of years, it's saving a huge amount of resources versus a house that has to be rebuilt over and over again.
You of course have to "futureproof" it as best as you can. E.g. just in the
1) Loans are amortized capital costs. Capital costs being the overwhelming majority of the cost of wind turbines. If you weren't paying off the capital costs, you'd be getting power for nearly free.
2) It doesn't matter what you think. They've found that the extra power they get justifies the cost of the upgrade. That doesn't even imply that the older technology's economics are bad, just that the new technology's are even better.
Interestingly enough, "rush hour traffic" is what current Level 2 systems are best at. Not at picking lanes, but at everything else. Lots of cars to help them stay centred in the lane even when lane markers are bad, slow speeds, etc, etc. It doesn't mean you can ignore the road, but it does mean less having to constantly focus on a line of unmoving cars to avoid the situation where if you don't start moving as soon as the car ahead of you does, people behind you get mad and start honking.
Which of course can be fatal. Yet they're struggling on the "low hanging fruit" aspects.
Should autonomous cars mature in my lifetime, I'm going to laugh so hard when there's the first widespread autonomous car hack. Suddenly, a million vehicles start converging on a single point, blocking all traffic in the entire region...
I'm not sure about "lifetime", but "any time soon"? Agreed. And I say this as a big Tesla fan. But the edge cases are just way too numerous, and not something you can just sweep on the rug with "oh, but it'll be safer because it never gets distracted...." Yeah, try telling that to the family of the person you just killed in a situation that a human could have easily avoided.
Sorry, I know, Leaf is an easy punching bag ;) It's overly simplified powertrain hurts it in a lot of other ways too, many of which aren't as obvious. For example, Leafs lose a lot of range in the winter, but Teslas only lose 10-20% (assuming dry pavement in both cases). Electric powertrains don't give off a ton of waste heat, but each component does give off a meaningful amount, and being able to capture it from one place and shunt it to another is hugely advantageous in adverse weather conditions.
But, the Leaf did what it's supposed to do: gave Nissan a way to roll out EVs in significant numbers quickly at an affordable price point. Now, however, it's time for that pricepoint to switch to properly managed EV powertrains. ;)
More to the point, it's basically a digital spirograph (remember those? :) ). Which, the question it raises to me is... why did it take so long before someone thought to make a digital spirograph?
Model 3s aren't double the price. They're about the same price for the same range (although you can add on more range and a lot more features, like dual motor AWD, performance packages, etc).