Li Ion batteries is mostly Nickel, comparatively a cheap metal. Lithium has the spotlight because its the critical breakthrough, but very little is necessary. I'm Brazilian BTW. The bet has been that Li Ion cells will reach US$ 100/kWh anywhere between 2020-2025. That would mean an actual 20kWh storage system @ less than US$ 5000. 20kWh allows people to fully live off grid in sunny areas.
Look into why Tesla/Elon Musk is investing billions on the Li Ion Giga Factory. A big part of the gamble is economies of scale leading to faster cost reductions in Li Ion costs. IF Li Ion prices haven't dropped significantly in the past 24 months its because the market is booming, with Tesla being the single largest worldwide buyer of Li Ion cells.
Then why would have Elon Musk put billions towards the Giga Factory, with two essential goals:
- Assure Li Ion supply for future growth
- Achieve a substantial Li Ion US$/kWh drop This is a single plant with capacity equal to 2013 worldwide production.
I've seen plenty of markets that seemed mature, but the fact those were stagnated due to lack of interest in innovating. We need thousands of GWh scale storage solutions. At costs closer to pumped hydro than Li Ion storage. Could be the chicken egg problem.
The Old Space establishment also said SpaceX wouldn't succeed. SpaceX F9R is improving performance substantially, at the lower launch costs of the market. Same for Tesla.
Don't tell me it can't be done. It probably needs an Elon Musk of the world to actually take upon himself to make it happen.
In 10 years Li Ion battery storage will be cheap enough that above US$ 0.20/kWh it will be cheaper to go off grid. Most roof top solar PV is selling to the grid at US$ 0.03/kWh, but today storage is way more expensive than the solar panels. Plus compressed air energy storage will drop in price. That's the real purpose of the subsidies today, we have the base scientific knowledge to achieve lots of things, but investors don't put their money on hopes and dreams, they demand return on investment. Over the next 10 years subsidies for pure renewables (without storage) should be zero. And subsidies moved over to renewables with 30 minutes bare minimum of peak production, with even higher subsidies for at least 2 hrs storage, which would make wind able to generate at night and release stored capacity before solar PV can ramp up around 10AM. And Solar with 2 hrs storage would close the cycle until sunset. Plus the possibility of wind energy storage discharge until Solar PV ramps up and recharge from Solar PV during the day, and Solar PV storage charge from wind during the night. If that were possible we're talking 4 hours worth of storage for matched Solar+Wind, just enough to close the cycle.
All wind is subsidized. Can't compete with natural gas electricity. Wind subsidies should be progressively cut over 10 years down to zero. This would greatly rationalize wind turbine installations, and make nuclear more interesting than wind long term. Nuclear is more expensive than natural gas or coal today, but coal is going away, and low natural gas prices are far from a sure thing long term. I wish natural gas suppliers were forced to offer long term fixed price contracts instead of floating as today. In a way, low natural gas should be seen as a potential coup to make gas suppliers very rich long terms, when they get their dominance in and reduce supply to force prices way up.
Actually offshore wind is cheaper than diesel. Diesel internal combustion generators is just about the most expensive way to produce electricity, by a long shot. The problem is offshore wind is just as unreliable as onshore. It does produce more electricity, but it oscilates just the same, so need large battery packs to store electricity (no pumped hydro on cape codd), and that's the really expensive part. With a reliable connection to the national grid, it might be possible to produce 5x island demand resulting in a minimum production level matching the island demand. Moving forward, all wind farms should be mandated to have energy storage worth at least 30 minutes of peak capacity, nowadays when a wind farm has local energy storage its a few minutes worth of peak capacity, just enough to smooth the ups and downs of output, which actually is very useful, but far from transforming wind into a baseload electricity source. Even 30 minutes peak storage is still far from making it into a baseload source.
My problem with wind turbines isn't the dead birds. Coal kills 13000 humans in the USA alone every year, 200k yearly worldwide. I'd rather kill 20000 birds than kill 10000 humans. I hope they make this endeavour happen. Offshore wind farms are the only type of wind farms that produce electricity with some real consistency. Most wind farms oscilate from 20%-40%-20% power output within minutes, do you know what that means for the grid ? Without economical, large scale energy storage, wind can't scale. Right now that means pumped hydro, which is very limited depending on geography. In the meantime, wind+solar helps take the focus away from the real problem, which is ending coal burning in the world without increasing natural gas consumption. Only nuclear can do that right now. If you really are concerned about climate change, you should be demading solar+wind+nuclear+biomass+geothermal, aka all of the above solution.
ISIS is loosing. But those funding it aren't. I wouldn't be surprised if the military industrial complex of NATO have something to do with it. Just consider how many TENS of BILLIONS of dollars NATO countries are spending on those ISIS airstrikes. And the GOP attitude that Obama isn't taking it serious. There are plenty of political movements worldwide that love an expensive war. They need to perpetuate the Cycle. Don't blame Bush for the invasion of Iraq, he was just the puppet, the puppeteers and their patrons is what we need to find. Obama isn't a pacifist. What he is actually trying to de escalate the situation. While the GOP need to escalate it to keep their sweet funding from the USA military industrial complex.
My solution is simple, go buy an EV, never use gasoline again. You will need a Tesla if you want a single car. Otherwise try a 2016 LEAF which would have 150 mile range, and have a Prius as a 2nd car. If enough people do this, the price of Oil will stay below US$ 60-70 for another decade (despite of future inflation). Remember US$ 30 oil in the mid 90s ? That was the best economic boom the USA ever seen. What Oil has to do with ISIS. Let's see. Al Qaida, ISIS, Iran, Al Shabab, Boko Haram, all directly or indirectly funded by Oil money. Stop sending money to the middle east. Once that happens, I predict terrorists will concentrate on Africa for its diamonds, gold, rare earths and other valuable commodities. Terrorism and dictatorships follow money. There was no terrorism to speak of before Oil prices shot up and made the middle east rich. The other solution is just nuke Iraq, Syria, Iran, Afghanistan... Lets leave that as a backup plan. I don't mean to actually do it, but to actually threaten doing it might actually force Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Iran and other states that directly or indirectly fund terrorism to actually do some effective about it.
I'm talking about converting desert into productive Hydroponics farms. Today the most critical aspect is producing freshwater to get it done. The most interesting way to do it is high temperature nuclear. The heat cycle to generate electricity with high temp source involves cooling down water from well over boiling point down to temps lower than boiling. That means free heat to boil water in huge scale, no penalty for doing so. The cooling is needed anyways. But the vast majority of current nuclear operates at 350C coolant temps, not high temperature. Several proposed reactors run anywhere from 450C to 700C, all of them able to dessalinate sea water. High temp nuclear is also got enough to make hydrogen, amonia, even synthetic methane (natural gas). When will we study nuclear facts and understand that nuclear kills / hurts orders of magnitude less people than coal, natural gas or oil. Deepwater horizon killed dozens of people and took the livelyhood of millions of fisherman and tourist industry professionals. Still nuclear gets the bad rap, while oil/gas drilling still allowed. Coal is estimated to kill about 200k yearly worldwide and 13k yearly in the USA alone. Natural gas and oil each is estimated to kill over 10k people yearly worldwide. The whole nuclear power supply chain killed one person in the last few decades, with total cummulative nuclear deaths for all nuclear related accidents of just a few hundred people, while coal is allowed to kill 13000 people EVERY YEAR. If coal power stations were regulated for their radioactivity emissions like nuclear reactors, they would all be shutdown imediately. The coal lobby was very forceful to keep its freedom to release deadly toxics and radioactivity almost freely, while nuclear reactors are burdened with insane regulatory costs. Nuclear doesn't have to be too expensive. It was made too expensive to prevent it from destroying the coal/gas industry.
At 7nm, we'll have computers easily 10x faster than today's 16nm fab we're shifting to. 16nm to 7nm we're halving each dimension so 2x2x2 increase in number of transistors in the same space, but going smaller transistors can decrease voltage and increase frequency, so 10x speedup easy. Hopefully we'll have 8 core CPUs with 4GB of on CPU memory. Having CPU/GPU/RAM/pretty much the whole computer on the main chip = lower memory access timing plus other advantages. Use that advantage wisely you lazy programmers, cause its your last opportunity to be lazy.
Wrong. Oil is cheap because of shale oil. The USA was almost self sufficient before the Saudis decided to try to undercut shale oil. But guess what, shale oil is getting more and more competitive. Some of it is still competitive @ US$ 60, which will eventually make it hard for oil to go above US$ 70-80. At US$ 80 most of the oil in the world is economical. It's really sad when people don't want to discuss with facts, but would rather cherry pick the argument that fits his agenda. You should watch Fareed Zakaria GPS and some other facts based programs, that focuses on educating us and finding solution to problems rather than creating 24x7 sensationalism.
If that guy is actually doing a 400 mile journey every day, the Tesla will come out free after five years, since even without free supercharger electrons, charging a Tesla is wayyy cheaper than buying gasoline, even with today's prices. A 85kWh Tesla * average US$ 0.12 / kWh = US$ 10 bucks to charge your car. With solar panels you can get that down by a bunch. That drives an average 250 miles. Or 4 cents per mile. So a full million miles would cost just US$ 40k in electricity !
How much does it costs your car to drive 250 miles ? Just Gas and Oil change to keep it simple. Teslas don't need to change engine oil or spark plugs. Most of maintenance is tire related. Mechanical breaks are there, but due to regen breaking, they wear very little.
Most people pay at least US$ 50 to drive 250 miles in gasoline alone.
Interestingly, I did the math for the 2015 Prius, which advertises 50mpg combined, with US$ 2 / gallon gas, would also put the Prius @ 4 cents / mile, excluding maintenance. Prius maintenance isn't quite a cheap as the Tesla, but since the Prius is less than half the price of a Tesla, money wise its interesting. But the Prius has nothing on luxury, performance, style and status of owning a Tesla.
The oil situation is utterly bad. In the worst case, refining heavy oil consumes so much natural gas just for refining that should that oil be left underground, and that gas went into an efficient natural gas thermal plant (60% efficiency), the Tesla would go further on the natural gas electricity alone vs the produced gasoline be put into a Prius. Now, most oil isn't heavy, but refining even the lightest easiest oil does consume lots of natural gas, in the end a Prius end up being about 20% efficient from well to wheel, while a Tesla gets above 40% from baseload natural gas (and even better in CO2/mile from the average USA grid generation). When you consider Canada Bitumen Oil, the pollution is even higher, as natural gas is burned to make steam to extract the oil from the ground, then more natural gas used for refining. The final quality of Bitumen Oil is good enough, but when the whole thing is added up, its even worse than heavy oil imported by large oil tankers.
In the meantime, the Tesla tells you how much range you have left projected in real time. Unlike many gas tanks, Tesla remaining power indications are reliable. There could be some change in kWh/mile consumption (going from flat to montain terrain, going from city to highway), but its way more accurate than gas cars. In the meantime, most cars can't even tell you how many gallons you have left with decent accuracy. Cars also greatly vary in miles/gallon rate due to changing driving conditions.
No, its because he's a wimp that can't do math. In regular cars in most situations you have a gas station every 10 miles or so in the city at a gas station every 20 miles or so at a highway. So most owners aren't afraid to push it to 50 mile reserves when they know there are gas stations everywhere. If you're lucky there's a supercharger every 100 miles along your route. Often a long trip needs planning, and some nerve for those that are usually lazy. Oh, and cold weather makes it worse. For us engineers, physicists, IT guys, pilots, their predicament is stupid. It's being fixed. It's called supercharger expansion and free HPWC equipment (Tesla medium power chargers) for businesses. Give it until end of 2016 and that argument will be squashed like a bug. For some it will take a 100 kWh battery pack plus some other range improvements that are bound to happen given Tesla insane innovation pace to finally kill this argument. By 2020 a top end Tesla should manage 500 miles range @ 60 mph and no ac or heating. At that point those people will feel comfortable to drive an actual 300-350 miles on a charge. PS: Nissan LEAF is a compliance car. Its a glorified golf cart. Until they get to at least 160 miles, they are a joke. When you have a 100 mile car in normal conditions, and add winter problems, the LEAF becomes next to useless in cold weather. And their real plans to upgrade the battery aren't spontaneous, they are driven by the Gen 3 Tesla and the Chevy Bolt. It's called compliance cars.
Like carriers, phone makers are all evil. At least Android is less evil. But in general phones today are optimized for usage in wifi. They are perfectly willing to gobble GBs of data very quickly, even for things you don't want to (specially when not home). Its the same thing with my chromebook. It auto downloads chrome os updates from the internet any time it finds them, even if I'm on a crappy GSM signal trying to get my e-mail in a hurry. And there's nowhere to block it easily. All phones need to have an intermediate model between airplane mode and normal data mode. A slow data mode. Block everything that isn't essential. But then we run into another fact, if we knew everything out phone os and phone apps do at all times, there would be LOTS of things we wouldn't want it to do EVER, but the phone marker and apps makers want it. In that game, Android is far from perfect, but its wayy better than iPhone.
When investors can't earn almost anything on fixed income, they pile on stocks. In essence, if interest rates=2%, stocks=x, if interest rates=1%, stocks=2x (apreciate so they give back the same rate of return), but then there's the other way around, when interest rates starts to rise, the stock market could crash predicting the revaluing of assets. The math isn't exactly 2%, x, 1%, 2x, there are other factors, but the basic idea is still true. A bubble is what happened before 2008, the market was overvalued by a lot, even with fed funds @ 8%. Completely different situation.
... Will destroy themselves centuries before they can come and kill us. Unless there is technology that we can only dream of today, like warp propulsion, our current physics can't provide us even with the means to power a warp drive. Even with the most advanced conceivable nuclear ion propulsion, coming with anything over a few dozen tons from the closest solar system is essentially inconceivable. If mankind decided to put together a large enough spaceship to send men to the nearest goldilock planet on another solar system would require all of earth to pool together massive resources, like decades worth of current space budget of all of earth's planets combined. So while it highly likely there are many planets with intelligent life in the milky way, that civilization would first have to fully unite itself before they could dream about launching a spaceship able to just visit earth. In fact should their intents be military, its far more likely they would land on Mars, and use Martian resources to increase their popullation and manufacturing resources before trying to attack us. Its all about understanding DeltaV, Specific Impulse and other utterly inconvenient scientific facts that make sending humans to other solar systems impossible today (hence the same challenges for the inverse trip). The rest is just Sci Fi. Maybe the next Einstein will revolutionize Physics like the last one and unleash practical, compact, lightweight fusion to power and solve warp drive physics to use that power. Take Ion thrusters. In order to be very efficient, it pushes individual little molecules at very high speeds, typically using electricity from solar panels. Very high ISP, but tiny thrust. That good old solar energy problem, low energy density. If we could increase ion thrust energy by a factor of a thousand, we would need monster energy sources to generate that kind of power, but if those are too heavy, the whole advantage of reducing the fuel used is wasted by the heavier energy source. So far there has been no viable electricity source that was light enough to replace solar cells to power an ion drive efficiently (for interplanetary level missions). Plus the most efficient propellants are heavy noble gasses, like Xenon and Krypton, both very hard to come by (one predictable source for them would be nuclear reactors, but solid fuel reactors make harvesting those complicated, can't drain the gasses in realtime). Some one will suggest plutonium 238 type nuclear thermal generators, but those only last one century, their power drops precipitously due to half life effect. It has to be a nuclear fusion / fission power source whose fuel can be stowed aboard and be good to use 10000 years later. Oh, and the ship must be big enough we must send families that will live and die aboard the ship. Those landing on the other side will be dozens to hundreds of generations later.
The sole reason you can't remove fuel rods from a recently shutdown PWR/BWR is this:
The reactor must be depressurized before fuel can be removed.
But after the reactor is down to 0.1% power, it can be depressurized, even without emergency cooling. There's a big water tank above the reactor that can be used to provide enough cooling after depressurization to allow for removing the fuel rods.
Handling fuel rods shutdown 4 weeks prior is normal operations. They will be radioactive, but within limits for removal from the reactor to the spent fuel pool. Perhaps you don't know about radiation suits, and special tools nuclear operators use to deal with spent fuel.
A spent fuel pool is big. Big enough to handle a couple times the full fuel load of a reactor. As long as one fuel pool has only old spent fuel or no fuel, freshly removed fuel will not boil off the pool. The spent fuel pool is normally a closed environment using fans to circulate the air, but in emergencies doors can be open which provide natural air circulation. Those are not my conclusions. Those are US NRC detailed scenarios, which have been confirmed by multiple nuclear regulatory agencies.
That's what I expected from you. Just FUD. You aren't interested in facts. Anti nuclear types can't accept simple logical facts. If you were right and I was wrong, refuelling within a month just wouldn't be possible. But IT is. The over 400 reactors in the world (except those that have online refuelling) must stop every 18 months or so, for a month to refuel. The one month shutdown is exactly due to decay heat. But the shutdown itsn't 2 months. It's not even 6 weeks. It's just one month. Of course if fuel must be handled by people, they use radiation suits, dosimeters, thick gloves. And long tools. If you stop to analyze this logically, you will start finding many of the crazy lies the anti type nukes created around Fukushima, to predict end of the world scenarios. Same thing for TMI. Guess what, 99% of predictions didn't happen. And the bulk of the remaining ones will fall down with another 10 years or so. It's all based on not knowing enough nuclear engineering or perverting nuclear engineering facts.
If you remove a fuel rod one month after a shutdown, and leave it without water cooling, it will eventually melt. But I'm pretty sure it take in the order of a full day of more before it melts.
That's why there's this thing called a spent fuel pool. Water cools it. But that water needs NO forced circulation.
I don't know what kind of equipment is used to effect that in typical reactors. In a CANDU reactor (not a typical reactor), it's all robotics, as the process is done online, fuel rods are taken from the reactor even at full power. If decay heat was that critical that the rod would melt in minutes, this process wouldn't be possible.
I'm just explaining nuclear engineering facts that can't be questioned. If decay heat was anything like you try to pretend it is, those processes wouldn't be possible, yet they are done around the world many times per months.
Please go study nuclear facts. Nuclear engineering. Not anti nuclear propaganda you seems to like so much. bellona doesn't count. nuclear-news.net doesn't count. green peace doesn't count. Caldicott's blog doesn't count.
Got confirmation from a nuclear professional. A refueling shutdown is around 4 weeks anyways. So in the discussed scenario, as long as the reactor didn't meltdown, just move the fuel to the spent fuel pool. This suggests it could be done even 2 weeks after an emergency shutdown, as decay heat is 0.2% @ 1wk and 0.1% @4wks, so in 2 wks it's around 0.15%. Remember this has been stated again and again, the first week is critical. I would add that the 2nd week is still a little delicate, but from the 3rd week on, the reactor is safe (even without emergency cooling).
If this were possible with 4 week shutdown, the overheating problem would be fully prevented. If its fresh fuel, or a rod that has been cooled for a long enough time, it would have essentially zero decay heat. We move the decay heat problem from inside the reactor (which is designed to minimize heat loss except to the primary heat exchanger), to the spent fuel pool, which is designed to maximize heat dissipation. Besides, on a shutdown reactor, you don't even need to replace fuel rods, those could be left empty, just remove all rods into the spent fuel pool, and decay heat power = zero.
Except there are emergency systems to vent excess heat. Involving secondary containment. You know that huge space outside the real reactor but inside that huge concrete dome. That's why I said "it can be dealt with", instead of the reactor would convect everything by itself. Plus the reactor looses some heat to its surrounding environment. Convection is only the heat that reaches the heat exchangers. There's radiation from the reactor into the secondary containment too. As secondary containment is huge, there's quite a bit of air to heat up. Plus convection capability is a function of temperature gradients, instead of power levels. The hotter the coolant is, the higher convection is. It's not by accident that AP1000 and ESBWR can do that without any pumps passively (even right after an emergency shutdown from full power). We're talking 65x less power, and dropping. Part of this process is continuously (but slowly) loosing coolant water into secondary containment (replenished from a large overhead tank). The other aspect I couldn't find an answer to, is how long until a reactor shutdown from full power reaches a safe enough state for refuelling, or cold enough that fuel rods can be moved to cooling pools. But I doubt its even 2 months. Refuelling doesn't shutdown a reactor for months (and it's done ONLINE with CANDU reactors). You are assuming 0.1% is a lot of power. It's not a little, but it's not a lot. Finally what matters isn't coolant temps, but core fuel temps (meltdown happens at the interface between fuel and cladding, melting the Zr, hydrogen is primarily produced by Zr + H2O reactions). This means the coolant could reach a higher temperature under very low power with the cladding still within limits, further increasing heat losses. I'm not a nuclear engineer, but those principles aren't nuclear specific, plus I have studied generalities about BWR and PWR in a formal class. It's basic thermodynamics.
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Li Ion batteries is mostly Nickel, comparatively a cheap metal. Lithium has the spotlight because its the critical breakthrough, but very little is necessary.
I'm Brazilian BTW.
The bet has been that Li Ion cells will reach US$ 100/kWh anywhere between 2020-2025.
That would mean an actual 20kWh storage system @ less than US$ 5000.
20kWh allows people to fully live off grid in sunny areas.
Look into why Tesla/Elon Musk is investing billions on the Li Ion Giga Factory. A big part of the gamble is economies of scale leading to faster cost reductions in Li Ion costs. IF Li Ion prices haven't dropped significantly in the past 24 months its because the market is booming, with Tesla being the single largest worldwide buyer of Li Ion cells.
Then why would have Elon Musk put billions towards the Giga Factory, with two essential goals:
- Assure Li Ion supply for future growth
- Achieve a substantial Li Ion US$/kWh drop
This is a single plant with capacity equal to 2013 worldwide production.
I've seen plenty of markets that seemed mature, but the fact those were stagnated due to lack of interest in innovating.
We need thousands of GWh scale storage solutions. At costs closer to pumped hydro than Li Ion storage.
Could be the chicken egg problem.
The Old Space establishment also said SpaceX wouldn't succeed. SpaceX F9R is improving performance substantially, at the lower launch costs of the market. Same for Tesla.
Don't tell me it can't be done. It probably needs an Elon Musk of the world to actually take upon himself to make it happen.
In 10 years Li Ion battery storage will be cheap enough that above US$ 0.20/kWh it will be cheaper to go off grid. Most roof top solar PV is selling to the grid at US$ 0.03/kWh, but today storage is way more expensive than the solar panels.
Plus compressed air energy storage will drop in price.
That's the real purpose of the subsidies today, we have the base scientific knowledge to achieve lots of things, but investors don't put their money on hopes and dreams, they demand return on investment.
Over the next 10 years subsidies for pure renewables (without storage) should be zero. And subsidies moved over to renewables with 30 minutes bare minimum of peak production, with even higher subsidies for at least 2 hrs storage, which would make wind able to generate at night and release stored capacity before solar PV can ramp up around 10AM. And Solar with 2 hrs storage would close the cycle until sunset. Plus the possibility of wind energy storage discharge until Solar PV ramps up and recharge from Solar PV during the day, and Solar PV storage charge from wind during the night. If that were possible we're talking 4 hours worth of storage for matched Solar+Wind, just enough to close the cycle.
All wind is subsidized. Can't compete with natural gas electricity.
Wind subsidies should be progressively cut over 10 years down to zero. This would greatly rationalize wind turbine installations, and make nuclear more interesting than wind long term. Nuclear is more expensive than natural gas or coal today, but coal is going away, and low natural gas prices are far from a sure thing long term. I wish natural gas suppliers were forced to offer long term fixed price contracts instead of floating as today. In a way, low natural gas should be seen as a potential coup to make gas suppliers very rich long terms, when they get their dominance in and reduce supply to force prices way up.
Actually offshore wind is cheaper than diesel. Diesel internal combustion generators is just about the most expensive way to produce electricity, by a long shot.
The problem is offshore wind is just as unreliable as onshore. It does produce more electricity, but it oscilates just the same, so need large battery packs to store electricity (no pumped hydro on cape codd), and that's the really expensive part. With a reliable connection to the national grid, it might be possible to produce 5x island demand resulting in a minimum production level matching the island demand.
Moving forward, all wind farms should be mandated to have energy storage worth at least 30 minutes of peak capacity, nowadays when a wind farm has local energy storage its a few minutes worth of peak capacity, just enough to smooth the ups and downs of output, which actually is very useful, but far from transforming wind into a baseload electricity source. Even 30 minutes peak storage is still far from making it into a baseload source.
Said the anonymous coward that cares more about bird deaths than coal killing humans.
My problem with wind turbines isn't the dead birds.
Coal kills 13000 humans in the USA alone every year, 200k yearly worldwide.
I'd rather kill 20000 birds than kill 10000 humans.
I hope they make this endeavour happen. Offshore wind farms are the only type of wind farms that produce electricity with some real consistency. Most wind farms oscilate from 20%-40%-20% power output within minutes, do you know what that means for the grid ?
Without economical, large scale energy storage, wind can't scale. Right now that means pumped hydro, which is very limited depending on geography.
In the meantime, wind+solar helps take the focus away from the real problem, which is ending coal burning in the world without increasing natural gas consumption. Only nuclear can do that right now.
If you really are concerned about climate change, you should be demading solar+wind+nuclear+biomass+geothermal, aka all of the above solution.
ISIS is loosing. But those funding it aren't. I wouldn't be surprised if the military industrial complex of NATO have something to do with it. Just consider how many TENS of BILLIONS of dollars NATO countries are spending on those ISIS airstrikes.
And the GOP attitude that Obama isn't taking it serious.
There are plenty of political movements worldwide that love an expensive war. They need to perpetuate the Cycle. Don't blame Bush for the invasion of Iraq, he was just the puppet, the puppeteers and their patrons is what we need to find.
Obama isn't a pacifist. What he is actually trying to de escalate the situation. While the GOP need to escalate it to keep their sweet funding from the USA military industrial complex.
My solution is simple, go buy an EV, never use gasoline again. You will need a Tesla if you want a single car. Otherwise try a 2016 LEAF which would have 150 mile range, and have a Prius as a 2nd car. ... Lets leave that as a backup plan. I don't mean to actually do it, but to actually threaten doing it might actually force Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Iran and other states that directly or indirectly fund terrorism to actually do some effective about it.
If enough people do this, the price of Oil will stay below US$ 60-70 for another decade (despite of future inflation). Remember US$ 30 oil in the mid 90s ? That was the best economic boom the USA ever seen.
What Oil has to do with ISIS. Let's see. Al Qaida, ISIS, Iran, Al Shabab, Boko Haram, all directly or indirectly funded by Oil money.
Stop sending money to the middle east.
Once that happens, I predict terrorists will concentrate on Africa for its diamonds, gold, rare earths and other valuable commodities. Terrorism and dictatorships follow money. There was no terrorism to speak of before Oil prices shot up and made the middle east rich.
The other solution is just nuke Iraq, Syria, Iran, Afghanistan
I'm talking about converting desert into productive Hydroponics farms.
Today the most critical aspect is producing freshwater to get it done.
The most interesting way to do it is high temperature nuclear.
The heat cycle to generate electricity with high temp source involves cooling down water from well over boiling point down to temps lower than boiling. That means free heat to boil water in huge scale, no penalty for doing so. The cooling is needed anyways.
But the vast majority of current nuclear operates at 350C coolant temps, not high temperature.
Several proposed reactors run anywhere from 450C to 700C, all of them able to dessalinate sea water.
High temp nuclear is also got enough to make hydrogen, amonia, even synthetic methane (natural gas).
When will we study nuclear facts and understand that nuclear kills / hurts orders of magnitude less people than coal, natural gas or oil.
Deepwater horizon killed dozens of people and took the livelyhood of millions of fisherman and tourist industry professionals. Still nuclear gets the bad rap, while oil/gas drilling still allowed.
Coal is estimated to kill about 200k yearly worldwide and 13k yearly in the USA alone.
Natural gas and oil each is estimated to kill over 10k people yearly worldwide.
The whole nuclear power supply chain killed one person in the last few decades, with total cummulative nuclear deaths for all nuclear related accidents of just a few hundred people, while coal is allowed to kill 13000 people EVERY YEAR.
If coal power stations were regulated for their radioactivity emissions like nuclear reactors, they would all be shutdown imediately.
The coal lobby was very forceful to keep its freedom to release deadly toxics and radioactivity almost freely, while nuclear reactors are burdened with insane regulatory costs.
Nuclear doesn't have to be too expensive. It was made too expensive to prevent it from destroying the coal/gas industry.
At 7nm, we'll have computers easily 10x faster than today's 16nm fab we're shifting to.
16nm to 7nm we're halving each dimension so 2x2x2 increase in number of transistors in the same space, but going smaller transistors can decrease voltage and increase frequency, so 10x speedup easy.
Hopefully we'll have 8 core CPUs with 4GB of on CPU memory. Having CPU/GPU/RAM/pretty much the whole computer on the main chip = lower memory access timing plus other advantages.
Use that advantage wisely you lazy programmers, cause its your last opportunity to be lazy.
Wrong. Oil is cheap because of shale oil. The USA was almost self sufficient before the Saudis decided to try to undercut shale oil.
But guess what, shale oil is getting more and more competitive. Some of it is still competitive @ US$ 60, which will eventually make it hard for oil to go above US$ 70-80. At US$ 80 most of the oil in the world is economical.
It's really sad when people don't want to discuss with facts, but would rather cherry pick the argument that fits his agenda.
You should watch Fareed Zakaria GPS and some other facts based programs, that focuses on educating us and finding solution to problems rather than creating 24x7 sensationalism.
If that guy is actually doing a 400 mile journey every day, the Tesla will come out free after five years, since even without free supercharger electrons, charging a Tesla is wayyy cheaper than buying gasoline, even with today's prices.
A 85kWh Tesla * average US$ 0.12 / kWh = US$ 10 bucks to charge your car. With solar panels you can get that down by a bunch.
That drives an average 250 miles. Or 4 cents per mile.
So a full million miles would cost just US$ 40k in electricity !
How much does it costs your car to drive 250 miles ? Just Gas and Oil change to keep it simple.
Teslas don't need to change engine oil or spark plugs. Most of maintenance is tire related. Mechanical breaks are there, but due to regen breaking, they wear very little.
Most people pay at least US$ 50 to drive 250 miles in gasoline alone.
Interestingly, I did the math for the 2015 Prius, which advertises 50mpg combined, with US$ 2 / gallon gas, would also put the Prius @ 4 cents / mile, excluding maintenance. Prius maintenance isn't quite a cheap as the Tesla, but since the Prius is less than half the price of a Tesla, money wise its interesting. But the Prius has nothing on luxury, performance, style and status of owning a Tesla.
The oil situation is utterly bad.
In the worst case, refining heavy oil consumes so much natural gas just for refining that should that oil be left underground, and that gas went into an efficient natural gas thermal plant (60% efficiency), the Tesla would go further on the natural gas electricity alone vs the produced gasoline be put into a Prius. Now, most oil isn't heavy, but refining even the lightest easiest oil does consume lots of natural gas, in the end a Prius end up being about 20% efficient from well to wheel, while a Tesla gets above 40% from baseload natural gas (and even better in CO2/mile from the average USA grid generation).
When you consider Canada Bitumen Oil, the pollution is even higher, as natural gas is burned to make steam to extract the oil from the ground, then more natural gas used for refining. The final quality of Bitumen Oil is good enough, but when the whole thing is added up, its even worse than heavy oil imported by large oil tankers.
In the meantime, the Tesla tells you how much range you have left projected in real time.
Unlike many gas tanks, Tesla remaining power indications are reliable. There could be some change in kWh/mile consumption (going from flat to montain terrain, going from city to highway), but its way more accurate than gas cars.
In the meantime, most cars can't even tell you how many gallons you have left with decent accuracy. Cars also greatly vary in miles/gallon rate due to changing driving conditions.
No, its because he's a wimp that can't do math. In regular cars in most situations you have a gas station every 10 miles or so in the city at a gas station every 20 miles or so at a highway. So most owners aren't afraid to push it to 50 mile reserves when they know there are gas stations everywhere.
If you're lucky there's a supercharger every 100 miles along your route. Often a long trip needs planning, and some nerve for those that are usually lazy. Oh, and cold weather makes it worse.
For us engineers, physicists, IT guys, pilots, their predicament is stupid.
It's being fixed. It's called supercharger expansion and free HPWC equipment (Tesla medium power chargers) for businesses. Give it until end of 2016 and that argument will be squashed like a bug.
For some it will take a 100 kWh battery pack plus some other range improvements that are bound to happen given Tesla insane innovation pace to finally kill this argument. By 2020 a top end Tesla should manage 500 miles range @ 60 mph and no ac or heating. At that point those people will feel comfortable to drive an actual 300-350 miles on a charge.
PS: Nissan LEAF is a compliance car. Its a glorified golf cart. Until they get to at least 160 miles, they are a joke. When you have a 100 mile car in normal conditions, and add winter problems, the LEAF becomes next to useless in cold weather. And their real plans to upgrade the battery aren't spontaneous, they are driven by the Gen 3 Tesla and the Chevy Bolt. It's called compliance cars.
Like carriers, phone makers are all evil. At least Android is less evil.
But in general phones today are optimized for usage in wifi. They are perfectly willing to gobble GBs of data very quickly, even for things you don't want to (specially when not home). Its the same thing with my chromebook. It auto downloads chrome os updates from the internet any time it finds them, even if I'm on a crappy GSM signal trying to get my e-mail in a hurry. And there's nowhere to block it easily.
All phones need to have an intermediate model between airplane mode and normal data mode. A slow data mode. Block everything that isn't essential.
But then we run into another fact, if we knew everything out phone os and phone apps do at all times, there would be LOTS of things we wouldn't want it to do EVER, but the phone marker and apps makers want it.
In that game, Android is far from perfect, but its wayy better than iPhone.
When investors can't earn almost anything on fixed income, they pile on stocks.
In essence, if interest rates=2%, stocks=x, if interest rates=1%, stocks=2x (apreciate so they give back the same rate of return), but then there's the other way around, when interest rates starts to rise, the stock market could crash predicting the revaluing of assets.
The math isn't exactly 2%, x, 1%, 2x, there are other factors, but the basic idea is still true.
A bubble is what happened before 2008, the market was overvalued by a lot, even with fed funds @ 8%. Completely different situation.
... Will destroy themselves centuries before they can come and kill us.
Unless there is technology that we can only dream of today, like warp propulsion, our current physics can't provide us even with the means to power a warp drive.
Even with the most advanced conceivable nuclear ion propulsion, coming with anything over a few dozen tons from the closest solar system is essentially inconceivable.
If mankind decided to put together a large enough spaceship to send men to the nearest goldilock planet on another solar system would require all of earth to pool together massive resources, like decades worth of current space budget of all of earth's planets combined.
So while it highly likely there are many planets with intelligent life in the milky way, that civilization would first have to fully unite itself before they could dream about launching a spaceship able to just visit earth. In fact should their intents be military, its far more likely they would land on Mars, and use Martian resources to increase their popullation and manufacturing resources before trying to attack us.
Its all about understanding DeltaV, Specific Impulse and other utterly inconvenient scientific facts that make sending humans to other solar systems impossible today (hence the same challenges for the inverse trip). The rest is just Sci Fi.
Maybe the next Einstein will revolutionize Physics like the last one and unleash practical, compact, lightweight fusion to power and solve warp drive physics to use that power.
Take Ion thrusters. In order to be very efficient, it pushes individual little molecules at very high speeds, typically using electricity from solar panels.
Very high ISP, but tiny thrust. That good old solar energy problem, low energy density.
If we could increase ion thrust energy by a factor of a thousand, we would need monster energy sources to generate that kind of power, but if those are too heavy, the whole advantage of reducing the fuel used is wasted by the heavier energy source. So far there has been no viable electricity source that was light enough to replace solar cells to power an ion drive efficiently (for interplanetary level missions).
Plus the most efficient propellants are heavy noble gasses, like Xenon and Krypton, both very hard to come by (one predictable source for them would be nuclear reactors, but solid fuel reactors make harvesting those complicated, can't drain the gasses in realtime).
Some one will suggest plutonium 238 type nuclear thermal generators, but those only last one century, their power drops precipitously due to half life effect. It has to be a nuclear fusion / fission power source whose fuel can be stowed aboard and be good to use 10000 years later.
Oh, and the ship must be big enough we must send families that will live and die aboard the ship. Those landing on the other side will be dozens to hundreds of generations later.
The sole reason you can't remove fuel rods from a recently shutdown PWR/BWR is this:
The reactor must be depressurized before fuel can be removed.
But after the reactor is down to 0.1% power, it can be depressurized, even without emergency cooling. There's a big water tank above the reactor that can be used to provide enough cooling after depressurization to allow for removing the fuel rods.
Handling fuel rods shutdown 4 weeks prior is normal operations. They will be radioactive, but within limits for removal from the reactor to the spent fuel pool. Perhaps you don't know about radiation suits, and special tools nuclear operators use to deal with spent fuel.
A spent fuel pool is big. Big enough to handle a couple times the full fuel load of a reactor. As long as one fuel pool has only old spent fuel or no fuel, freshly removed fuel will not boil off the pool. The spent fuel pool is normally a closed environment using fans to circulate the air, but in emergencies doors can be open which provide natural air circulation. Those are not my conclusions. Those are US NRC detailed scenarios, which have been confirmed by multiple nuclear regulatory agencies.
That's what I expected from you. Just FUD. You aren't interested in facts. Anti nuclear types can't accept simple logical facts. If you were right and I was wrong, refuelling within a month just wouldn't be possible. But IT is. The over 400 reactors in the world (except those that have online refuelling) must stop every 18 months or so, for a month to refuel. The one month shutdown is exactly due to decay heat. But the shutdown itsn't 2 months. It's not even 6 weeks. It's just one month.
Of course if fuel must be handled by people, they use radiation suits, dosimeters, thick gloves. And long tools.
If you stop to analyze this logically, you will start finding many of the crazy lies the anti type nukes created around Fukushima, to predict end of the world scenarios. Same thing for TMI. Guess what, 99% of predictions didn't happen. And the bulk of the remaining ones will fall down with another 10 years or so. It's all based on not knowing enough nuclear engineering or perverting nuclear engineering facts.
If you remove a fuel rod one month after a shutdown, and leave it without water cooling, it will eventually melt. But I'm pretty sure it take in the order of a full day of more before it melts.
That's why there's this thing called a spent fuel pool. Water cools it. But that water needs NO forced circulation.
I don't know what kind of equipment is used to effect that in typical reactors. In a CANDU reactor (not a typical reactor), it's all robotics, as the process is done online, fuel rods are taken from the reactor even at full power. If decay heat was that critical that the rod would melt in minutes, this process wouldn't be possible.
I'm just explaining nuclear engineering facts that can't be questioned. If decay heat was anything like you try to pretend it is, those processes wouldn't be possible, yet they are done around the world many times per months.
Please go study nuclear facts. Nuclear engineering. Not anti nuclear propaganda you seems to like so much. bellona doesn't count. nuclear-news.net doesn't count. green peace doesn't count. Caldicott's blog doesn't count.
Got confirmation from a nuclear professional. A refueling shutdown is around 4 weeks anyways. So in the discussed scenario, as long as the reactor didn't meltdown, just move the fuel to the spent fuel pool. This suggests it could be done even 2 weeks after an emergency shutdown, as decay heat is 0.2% @ 1wk and 0.1% @4wks, so in 2 wks it's around 0.15%.
Remember this has been stated again and again, the first week is critical. I would add that the 2nd week is still a little delicate, but from the 3rd week on, the reactor is safe (even without emergency cooling).
If this were possible with 4 week shutdown, the overheating problem would be fully prevented. If its fresh fuel, or a rod that has been cooled for a long enough time, it would have essentially zero decay heat. We move the decay heat problem from inside the reactor (which is designed to minimize heat loss except to the primary heat exchanger), to the spent fuel pool, which is designed to maximize heat dissipation.
Besides, on a shutdown reactor, you don't even need to replace fuel rods, those could be left empty, just remove all rods into the spent fuel pool, and decay heat power = zero.
Except there are emergency systems to vent excess heat. Involving secondary containment. You know that huge space outside the real reactor but inside that huge concrete dome.
That's why I said "it can be dealt with", instead of the reactor would convect everything by itself.
Plus the reactor looses some heat to its surrounding environment. Convection is only the heat that reaches the heat exchangers. There's radiation from the reactor into the secondary containment too. As secondary containment is huge, there's quite a bit of air to heat up.
Plus convection capability is a function of temperature gradients, instead of power levels. The hotter the coolant is, the higher convection is. It's not by accident that AP1000 and ESBWR can do that without any pumps passively (even right after an emergency shutdown from full power). We're talking 65x less power, and dropping. Part of this process is continuously (but slowly) loosing coolant water into secondary containment (replenished from a large overhead tank).
The other aspect I couldn't find an answer to, is how long until a reactor shutdown from full power reaches a safe enough state for refuelling, or cold enough that fuel rods can be moved to cooling pools. But I doubt its even 2 months. Refuelling doesn't shutdown a reactor for months (and it's done ONLINE with CANDU reactors).
You are assuming 0.1% is a lot of power. It's not a little, but it's not a lot.
Finally what matters isn't coolant temps, but core fuel temps (meltdown happens at the interface between fuel and cladding, melting the Zr, hydrogen is primarily produced by Zr + H2O reactions). This means the coolant could reach a higher temperature under very low power with the cladding still within limits, further increasing heat losses.
I'm not a nuclear engineer, but those principles aren't nuclear specific, plus I have studied generalities about BWR and PWR in a formal class. It's basic thermodynamics.