Of common terrorist targets? Of course - I am military, and it only makes sense to pay some attention to the targets terrorists actually attack before going off and saying this or that is a terrorist target - when there has never been a terrorist attack on it, nor even information intercepted saying that they're considering a strike on one.
Summary of Wiki Links 2000's: 0 fatalities 1990s: 2 civilian deaths; 11 soldiers exposed to enough radiation to suffer 3rd degree burns. The civilians violated regulations rather extremely 1980s: ~50 civilians(Chernobyl), 1 in an experimental reactor. 13 military - a couple of incidents involving USSR submarines. I'm not counting the one killed in a non-nuclear explosion caused by leaking booster fuel. 1970s: 52 USSR submariners died when their submarine sunk due to 2 fires; it mentions both reactors were shut down - might not have anything to do with nuclear materials. 1960s: 'Rumored' 30 civilian sailors on the USSR's first nuclear ship - they actually BROKE INTO the reactor housing. Military: 3+ - One incident mentions deaths due to radiation, but not how many. 1950s: 1 civilian scientist - among 6 that received e2xperimental bone marrow transplants, but rejected and they still survived. 1 Military, 33 possible from cancer, plus a bunch of birth defects from a fubared nuclear bomb test(it was bigger and dirtier than expected). 1940s: 2 military due to radiation poisoning.
I come up with 83 deaths due to Civilian nuclear power, 104 due to Military stuff, not counting things like plane accidents that the cause of death didn't involve the nuclear weapons. Over the course of 60 years. Around 3 deaths a year from both causes.
You're right, it IS dangerous. I mean, it'll only take a thousand years to catch up with the immediate deaths caused by the chemical accident in Bhopal! Two thousand to match the deaths of Coal Miners in China for 2004. To be fair, it'll be a mere 9 years for coal mining in the USA.
Given how dangerous our roads are, I figure Solar/Wind will end up being more dangerous due to the miles needing to be driven to service all the panels/turbines.
Safe? So-so. The risk of a Chernobyl-style catastrophic failure may be low,
Try virtually nonexistent - I'm more likely to win the lottery.
but the consequences are enormous.
There's still people living in the exclusion zone around Chernobyl. Their cancer rates are actually lower than at a neighboring city. It's turned into a kind of wildlife refuge. Sure, it's an issue - but so isn't all the chemical pollution superfund type sites around.
Heck, look up Bhopal for a real human made disaster.
Clean? No. The waste disposal problem remains unsolved, and uranium mining remains a tremendously dirty business.
Unsolved in the USA, France and Japan seem to have little issue with it. As for Uranium mining - we don't need much of it, so the net pollution still remains far less than for a coal plant. And we've developed cleaner methods to get yellowcake.
Rather than building more uranium and plutonium fission plants, we'd be better off putting those resources into developing accelerator-driven systems using thorium systems, and fusion.
And I think we'd be better off continuing development of those systems as we put effort into building nuclear plants to replace the dirty coal plants that produce loads of pollution, as well as the aging, relatively inefficient nuclear plants we've extended far beyond their original design lifetime.
To my knowledge, we don't have coal powered trucks for mining coal, fan powered hoists for wind turbines, or solar forges for solar panels.
That's because oil has thus far been particularly suitable for mobile power. We need electric vehicles run by nuclear power - it's not a real problem in the restricted confines of a mine.
The fact is that it takes about 5 orders of magnitude less uranium for a given amount of electricity helps with the efficiency.
Right now it's cheaper to exploit nuclear fission than to collect the power emitted by the sun in many cases.
The fallacy in your reasoning is that if you have enough stuff with a 10,000 year half-life, even though its radioactivity-per-gram is low, total radioactivity can be high enough to cause health risks to nearby living creatures.
You do realize that the logical answer to this part is to grind the waste up and distribute it, right? The fact we can concentrate it so much is what allows us to contain it in the first place.
Even a solid block weighing hundreds of pounds isn't going to hurt you if it's an alpha emitter, as long as you aren't eating/inhaling it.
Uh, it really is dangerous. That's why nuclear power plants are considered terrorist targets.
That's funny, nuclear plants don't even make my list. On my list are things like planes, train stations, embassies and other government buildings, cafes, malls, and busses.
While you are correct that Chernobyl was a bad design and an ill-conceived experiment started the disaster, do you recall what caused Three Mile Island or what the consequences might have been had the hydrogen bubble ignited?
Do you recall that TMI happened BEFORE Chernobyl, and sparked a quite thorough redesign of reactors to make them safer, and GenIV reactors, if we ever get around to building them, would be safer yet?
And the bigger problem is the cost and various issues with properly sequestering the waste. Using nuclear power is basically like borrowing to run the country - we get the immediate benefit and our children have to pay the price.
First, the stuff is safer than coal - a lot of the pollution from coal actually ends up in the environment. Besides that, I(and many other nuclear proponents) figure we'll be going after that high level waste in less than a hundred years to use it as fuel again. Other options include breeder reactors and reprocessing using modern methods to reduce the amount of waste, and the lifespan of the waste, substantially.
Any idea how much it will cost to pay just for the guards to monitor a waste site for 100,000 years or so? I don't think that is factored into the cost of electricity from a nuclear plant, is it?
How long until the Mercury released by Coal plants exits out of the environment? How long until the CO2 is sequestered again?
And yes - it is factored in. The federal government told the nuclear power plant operators: You WILL pay us $X per megawatt/hour produced. We WILL dispose of the waste. There's lawsuits going on about that one.
But it takes condensing humidity to cause corrosion - and we're unlikely to have it on active servers warmer than their surroundings.
Wasn't there an article a couple weeks ago about a Nevada data center running with no A/C or humitidy control at all? They only experienced about 1% greater failure rates?
A lot of the telephone tolerance stuff first came up back when a lot of the switching was [i]mechanical[/i] in nature. Even after that, you had more analogue stuff, more discrete components, etc...
Now what interests me is that if google are guaranteeing to run these chips at a minimum temperature and therefore could increase the yield by accepting chips that would otherwise have been a failure because they couldn't run at a cold temperature...
Given that CPUs are heat generating devices, and from everything I've heard will operate even in liquid nitrogen, I don't think the cold end is much of an issue.
If your going to be running your computer outside in Antartica* during the winter, at night, all you'd have to do is put a smaller heat sink on it.
*Don't know why, that extra 100 watts is another 100 watts to keep your living area warm.
Did you take into account that the you'd need to double the resistance of the two resistors to get the right resistance?
Rt = 1/(1/R1+1/R2)
Or you could use two half value units in series.
Either way, the price difference between 5% resisters and 10% resisters is generally NOT a factor of 2, so if you need the closer tolerance, just go with a better band. They come in 20%, 10%, 5%, 2%, and 1%.
On the plus size, the resisters on the whole would be able to withstand almost twice as many watts(the lower resistance one would fail first).
Last I looked, 20% margin resisters were hard to find. Now it looks like 10% are hard as well. Still, even at a bit over double the price at that cheap isn't going to gain you much. The extra soldering is going to be a pain.
Somehow, I doubt that very seriously. I don't see gasoline prices dropping significantly in future, no matter what people drive. Demand from China and India will be more than enough to keep prices high from here on out.
Looks at current price posted at gas station... Depends on your definition of 'significant' I guess. Just heard on the radio that some stations are under $3. Oil usage in the USA is actually down 5% this year. It's a first.
Also, I wasn't talking about prices dropping. I was talking about is that if you have millions of urban/suburban types switching to non-liquid petrol vehicles such as EVs, the price won't increase as fast, as people are switching to alternatives due to cost, and therefore keeping demand down, lowering the pressure to increase prices.
As for China/India, oil prices are slamming them even harder. Still, they have a good opportunity to build cities that makes travel without a car easier than with one. And I don't mean by simply making car travel difficult.
You travel at a more leisurely rate than I do.
I cramp up if I sit still for that long. *Shrug*
Note that $10/gallon gasoline will probably shift a lot of my driving to flying, assuming flying costs don't go up proportionally. Which they probably will.
The airlines have been screaming for a while, it does. Still, for longer trips a filled plane is actually a very efficient mode of travel.
And greyhound has been experiencing a revival from what I've heard...
Hell, I might win the Powerball next week (unlikely, I only buy a ticket when the prize if over $100 million, and that won't happen next week), and buy three new cars, all hybrids or HEV's....
Just don't go crazy... Have you seen the rates at which big lotto winners end up declaring bankruptcy?
Averages slightly more often than weekly over the last couple-three years.
Would those trips still occur; be economical at $10/gallon gasoline? Anyways - consider this. You keep your cars, every inner-city type that don't travel long distances that buys a EV will help keep your gasoline costs down.
The ten minute charge thing is to allow me to do those >400 mile trips without an overnight stop. Which is why 30 minutes for a charge is acceptable if the range is 400 miles (enough time for a lunch break after six hours on the road), but ten minutes is required if the range is only 250 miles (less than four hours on the road, and I'm not going to be willing to stop for an extended time, especially since most of my over 400 mile trips are also over 500 miles, and would require two stops).
Going by my 750 mile trips to my parents - I end up stopping 3 times for gas. Driving through the upper midwest I have to judge my stops a bit in order to maintain a reserve between stations, so I generally end up topping off with still having half a tank once due to the way the towns are.
I normally figure 45-60 minutes for lunch, after being in a car for that long I take a nice sit down meal. I've also plotted out starting early, having breakfast around 7-8, then lunch at 12-1, dinner 5-6. At 300 miles a pop(4 hours@75), that's 1200 miles in a day. Call it 800 to have a healthy reserve, 8 hours of sleep, and not precisely placed charging/eating areas.
I was going to buy their dual band n router before the injunction hit because it was one of only 2 dual band Ns available at the time, and the specs were impressive.
May I ask, how often do you engage in a greater than 200 mile trip in a single day?
That said, I'll evaluate the options the next time a car collapses into a black hole, and see what makes sense. It'll depend on which car collapses, and what gasoline prices are like then. And what is available on the market.
At the moment the best you'd likely get would be a hybrid. I'd have the battery checked really good. With the economy the way it is, I figure that buying a non-fuel guzzler used is going to be fairly difficult - the leasing market that used to provide a lot of newer used cars has dried up substantially, people are worried about their jobs and investments, credit is harder to get, thus they're more likely to hold onto any fuel efficient vehicles. The guzzlers are already quite available to the point used car lots can't move them enough to justify buying or accepting them as trade-ins.
I concede your point that you can make EVs popular if you can convince 1% of the population buy one or more of them. I'm not so sure that you can do that, though, without an infrastructure that allows fillups on the road (the ten minute charge I mentioned).
The problem with the 10 minute charge is the fact that you're practically up into the lightning bolt over copper energy range. Unless the car's more like a motorcycle, I don't see it happening.
On the other hand, I figure it'll balance out by people not having to visit a gas station. Plug it in at home, rather than going to a station, running your credit card or prepaying, sitting there while the vehicle fills up. Most vehicles will get a good 8 hours of charge time a night - enough to drop the amps needed down to dryer socket level.
Top it off at work if you want, though I'd imagine the power companies would prefer night charging.
If gas prices get high enough, it'd still be cheaper for most to rent a hybrid or generator trailer for longer trips.
The problem here is that it's still going to end up being an overlong vehicle, assuming nothing odd. It's also going to FUBAR your suspension unless it has it's own axle. Talking with my grandfather, so much as one of those wheelchair lifts/holders is enough weight to do that. Reduces your steering ability, and drive ability if the vehicle is a FWD.
Parking wouldn't be much more difficult - remember, the idea is that it's for long trips. Most areas have spots available for semis along the highway, or you could take two spots.
At that point, swapping the vehicle out for a hybrid would make more sense.
I figured as much. And the EV companies are going to have to try to sell the things to people like me more than to people who are drooling EV fanatics - there aren't enough drooling EV fanatics to justify the assembly line.
I'm far from a drooling EV fanatic. What I am is a techie with a thorough grounding in accounting and economics(both parents accountants, go figure). Thus I find EVs and hybrids very neat - but sadly, not economical.
As for marketing to you - well, they wouldn't necessarily have to reach you, specifically. What they need to do is make it economical for, say, 1% of the population. There's around 135M cars in the USA. Figure a 10 year replacement cycle, on average, that's 13.5M cars sold per year to maintain the same number of vehicles. If 1% go for the EV/Hybrid/whatever, that's 135K vehicles sold - many cars make money on smaller markets.
On a final note, part of my 10X figure was 'what if gasoline prices go back up?'. What if gasoline hit $10/gallon in the not too far future? Even if EVs don't go down in price one cent, every cent gasoline goes up
I value the 500 mile range a LOT. I'd be willing to drop to 400, if the car was otherwise worthwhile, but not below that. And it'd have to be really worthwhile to make me give up that 100 mile cushion. I can afford to keep a vehicle that can get by nicely on 200 miles, but the other two have to be able to handle greater ranges to justify my paying for them.
You're a longer ranged customer, then. I get by fine on 300 miles - and I drive 60+ a day. Heck, I ride my motorcycle a lot and only get 120 miles out of it's tank.
Remember, with an EV or PHEV you don't need to visit the gas station to 'fill up', it can be done from home.
Acceptable charging times: for a commuter car, four hours. For a real car, no more than 30 minutes. And that 30 minutes is only acceptable if the range on a charge is 400+ miles. For shorter range on charge, I'll want charging time on the order of ten minutes, max.
I'm going to use the 200wh/mile figure, and 300 miles as an 'average' range. That'd require a 60kwh battery pack. To fill it in 4 hours, at 220V, would require a bit more than 68 Amps to charge. Call it 100A to charge it up faster in the beginning to make up the slower charging near the end for most battery technologies*. Copper cable rated for 100A is as big around as the average thumb, and modern household services are typically 200A. Certainly doable, just need to hire an electrician to make a heavy duty run to the garage/carport.
For a 30 minute charge - you're looking at 800A@220V. That's getting beyond 'cable' and looking at bars. 10 minutes? 2.4KA tends to melt stuff(not that 800A won't). So you're going to be looking at a special service for the faster charge times, likely 600V or higher to keep the cable size down. You're still talking lots of amps though, even at voltages prone to arcing in the air.
If the EV costs more to own and operate over a five year period, including the car payments, than a gasoline car, I have no use for it. So the difference in operating costs can't push the price higher than the savings on operating costs. Which means the EV really can't be more than a couple-three thousand dollars more than a comparable gasoline car.
Given your emphasis on range, I'd figure you're probably spending $5k or so a year on gasoline. That means it could be $10-15k more than a gasoline car and STILL save money overall.
Part of the economic aspect is that substantial savings can be realized with a pure EV over a hybrid, for those that fit the profile. You probably don't fit that profile - but a 40mpg PHEV that uses 300watt-hours a mile might save you quite a bit of money, especially if gasoline prices shoot up again.
My other cars? One yes, one maybe. Of course, you haven't actually provided any real numbers for price "per gallon" for an EV, so no way to say that those numbers would be realistic.
I was being almost like an economist - feeling out your comfort zone. Just how much do you value that 500 mile range? I wasn't trying for real numbers. Think like a car company feeling out potential customers - how much range to they think they need? How much do they want? What charging time would be acceptable? What would be good? How much are they willing to pay? How much can they save? Etc...
I won't even try to come up with a 'per gallon' rate. Between the volatility of gas prices and the various electric rates it's useless. Instead I'll reduce it down to a common figure that makes sense - cents per mile
One of the things you run into with EV's is that most data is for converted Lead Acid DC motor driven vehicles - commercial vehicles can be a lot more efficient. So I'll use the Tesla. The Tesla Roadster is rated at 200 watt-hours or 5 miles/kwh.
It depends a lot on your electricity cost - which varies more across the country than gasoline. Some people get deals and pay around 5 cents/Kwh. Some people pay 20 or more.
A 32 mpg vehicle will cost 12.5 cents per mile at $4 gallon. At 10 cents a kwh, a Tesla Roadster will cost you 2 cents. At 20(expensive electricity!), it'd be 4 cents.
At 30 cents per gallon gas taxes, that works out to less than a penny per mile(for a 32mpg vehicle). So it'd raise the EV to 3 cents, or still slightly less than a quarter the price of your vehicle per mile. Still less than half for expensive electricity.
As for a surtax for electricity - unless you drive a LOT, any extra electricity surcharge will disappear into the other uses people use electricity for. I drive a lot, and even for me, I'd only use $36 of electricity for my vehicle a month - and that's half my current utility bill. So unless they mandate a separate meter, the tax is going to be problematic.
That's not including extra costs due to batteries, reduced costs because of less maintenance(no oil chances on a electric motor), and assumes taxes and insurance are a wash, of course.
How big is your tank? What's your mpg? How much does a fillup cost?
Would you accept a halving of range if that meant your fillups cost $1/gallon? 30 cents?
I ride my motorcycle quite a bit in the warmer season, and I only have ~120 miles of range with it. On the other hand, fillups not breaking $10 vs $70 for my truck make up for a lot.
They might eventually come out with a cheaper sports car, but that's not currently on their table. They wouldn't be able to make money at the $75k price point at this time for a sports car.
Car companies aren't stupid; they wouldn't sell a car which couldn't make long trips without charging.
GM sold^H^H^H^Hleased the EV1, there's a number EV vans out there for commercial use. They can't make an especially long trip without charging.
How about a generator under the hood, like, say, one of the ones that every plug-in hybrid ever sold or announced has pre-installed?
Two issues: Weight and cost. It's very difficult to make a hybrid with over a hundred mile pure electric range because you have to have the engine and all the assorted support equipment in there instead of batteries. We're talking hundreds of pounds for the engine, the radiator, fuel tank, etc... This reduces range for a given amount of batteries. On the cost front, while a pure hybrid will cost less than a EV + trailer, if EVs take off you could normally get by simply renting a trailer when necessary. Or a more traditional gas-guzzler for that matter.
The price for the roadster itself is unlikely to drop; that's part of it's mystic. Instead they're looking at coming out with more of a 'family' car with actual cargo capacity - but ~half the range at this point.
Part of the Tesla's range is from the sheer number of batteries it takes to provide the current capacity a sports car wants.
You have the same idea of what a 'truck' should be as I do, I have learned from replies that this thing is actually a compact SUV, which makes mildly more sense for skiing at least, but it still is a poor offroader so it's most likely just for display.
I figure it was selected because of all the hybrids out there, the Escape is the only one that could remotely be considered an off-roader or 'inclement weather' vehicle.
If she doesn't use the grid at all to power up the vehicle I'm still not convinced she'll be gaining much apart from through the regenerative braking.
The escape is a purpose built hybrid - that part she didn't retrofit on. What she got for her $35k was a much larger battery pack and some ECU modifications to accomidate it's plug in nature.
I wasn't saying that hybrid is a bad idea in all situations, but personally I'd prefer a fully electric vehicle and have the option to get a roadside recharge or something in an emergency.
Assuming you have some smarts, you'd be able to get a slow emergency recharge anywhere you can get electricity. Being over in Europe, you have the bonus of readily available 220V plugs for even more charging ability.
Assuming you're not a long way from home/destination, you get a bite to eat and can finish the trip.
electric only wouldn't work so well in North America, with the massive mileage most people have to do. I'm pretty sure I could walk right around the perimeter of my city in less than a day - it's not quite the same somewhere like Houston though! And that's just the cities, nevermind the distance between cities..
It's actually pretty lopsided. Something like half of people could do just fine with an EV with a 50 mile range for 95% of their trips. The only problem is that such a vehicle currently costs so much that a pure gas vehicle is cheaper and does 99%.
The difference is one was dealing with paint (inanimate substance) one is dealing with cows (dumb animals), anything dealing with inanimate objects is relatively easy and cheap to automate, anything dealing with animate objects (or irregular objects) is difficult and expensive to automate
Wasn't it not that long ago that we had a article here about automated milking machines, and no longer having to get up early in the morning to milk the herd?
Oops - one correction. I listed the Baker EV's range as a 'few miles'. Per the article, it's actually around a hundred, but the cells have to be chemically refreshed after that - they're a variation of permanent alkelines.
To expand, I remember a story about a car in Leno's garage. At this point, it's around a hundred years old, but it's a 100% EV.
Originally intended for women, it has things like a makeup kit & mirror built in. Only has a few miles range, but is so dead silent that Leno's wife likes to use it to go looking at wildlife - it doesn't scare them.
EV's have as long of a history as IC vehicles - perhaps even longer! Steam engines predate both by a bit, but have fallen out of usage. It's just that in the course of history, EV's couldn't keep up, cost or feature wise, with the Otto cycle except in special circumstances - sealed buildings worried about exhaust, for example. Of course, after re-reading the article, I'm tempted to build a steam car again.;)
The electric motor is mature, efficient, and durable. The only problem remaining is the energy storage system. If somebody could come up with a battery that holds twice as much power at half the cost, I figure we'd swap the percentages of electric and gasoline vehicles inside of a decade. Gasoline/diesel would be the special purpose.
It's sad that Toyota is waffling about a plug-in Prius; seems to me that they are underestimating the rethink of the two car family: the "urban" electric car for short commutes, and the "guzzler" for distance driving.
I think that it's more along the lines that those $10k+ conversion kits aren't more than 50% more expensive than doing it at the factory, especially when you consider warranty periods and requirements that conversion kits can ignore but auto manufacturers can't.
Basically, the engineers are coming up with numbers that aren't making economical sense for enough customers to be worth it. They probably have some sort of 'gold standard' listing of requirements, and the engineers can't make the range, durability, and charging time while still meeting cost limits.
Sadly, Hybrids still don't make economic sense for most people. Double battery capacity while halving the price, and we'd be in business.
Slashdot Mirror
You have a list?
Of common terrorist targets? Of course - I am military, and it only makes sense to pay some attention to the targets terrorists actually attack before going off and saying this or that is a terrorist target - when there has never been a terrorist attack on it, nor even information intercepted saying that they're considering a strike on one.
Summary of Wiki Links
2000's: 0 fatalities
1990s: 2 civilian deaths; 11 soldiers exposed to enough radiation to suffer 3rd degree burns. The civilians violated regulations rather extremely
1980s: ~50 civilians(Chernobyl), 1 in an experimental reactor. 13 military - a couple of incidents involving USSR submarines. I'm not counting the one killed in a non-nuclear explosion caused by leaking booster fuel.
1970s: 52 USSR submariners died when their submarine sunk due to 2 fires; it mentions both reactors were shut down - might not have anything to do with nuclear materials.
1960s: 'Rumored' 30 civilian sailors on the USSR's first nuclear ship - they actually BROKE INTO the reactor housing. Military: 3+ - One incident mentions deaths due to radiation, but not how many.
1950s: 1 civilian scientist - among 6 that received e2xperimental bone marrow transplants, but rejected and they still survived. 1 Military, 33 possible from cancer, plus a bunch of birth defects from a fubared nuclear bomb test(it was bigger and dirtier than expected).
1940s: 2 military due to radiation poisoning.
I come up with 83 deaths due to Civilian nuclear power, 104 due to Military stuff, not counting things like plane accidents that the cause of death didn't involve the nuclear weapons. Over the course of 60 years. Around 3 deaths a year from both causes.
You're right, it IS dangerous. I mean, it'll only take a thousand years to catch up with the immediate deaths caused by the chemical accident in Bhopal! Two thousand to match the deaths of Coal Miners in China for 2004. To be fair, it'll be a mere 9 years for coal mining in the USA.
Given how dangerous our roads are, I figure Solar/Wind will end up being more dangerous due to the miles needing to be driven to service all the panels/turbines.
Safe? So-so. The risk of a Chernobyl-style catastrophic failure may be low,
Try virtually nonexistent - I'm more likely to win the lottery.
but the consequences are enormous.
There's still people living in the exclusion zone around Chernobyl. Their cancer rates are actually lower than at a neighboring city. It's turned into a kind of wildlife refuge. Sure, it's an issue - but so isn't all the chemical pollution superfund type sites around.
Heck, look up Bhopal for a real human made disaster.
Clean? No. The waste disposal problem remains unsolved, and uranium mining remains a tremendously dirty business.
Unsolved in the USA, France and Japan seem to have little issue with it. As for Uranium mining - we don't need much of it, so the net pollution still remains far less than for a coal plant. And we've developed cleaner methods to get yellowcake.
Rather than building more uranium and plutonium fission plants, we'd be better off putting those resources into developing accelerator-driven systems using thorium systems, and fusion.
And I think we'd be better off continuing development of those systems as we put effort into building nuclear plants to replace the dirty coal plants that produce loads of pollution, as well as the aging, relatively inefficient nuclear plants we've extended far beyond their original design lifetime.
Do we have nuclear-powered mining trucks now?
To my knowledge, we don't have coal powered trucks for mining coal, fan powered hoists for wind turbines, or solar forges for solar panels.
That's because oil has thus far been particularly suitable for mobile power. We need electric vehicles run by nuclear power - it's not a real problem in the restricted confines of a mine.
The fact is that it takes about 5 orders of magnitude less uranium for a given amount of electricity helps with the efficiency.
Right now it's cheaper to exploit nuclear fission than to collect the power emitted by the sun in many cases.
The fallacy in your reasoning is that if you have enough stuff with a 10,000 year half-life, even though its radioactivity-per-gram is low, total radioactivity can be high enough to cause health risks to nearby living creatures.
You do realize that the logical answer to this part is to grind the waste up and distribute it, right? The fact we can concentrate it so much is what allows us to contain it in the first place.
Even a solid block weighing hundreds of pounds isn't going to hurt you if it's an alpha emitter, as long as you aren't eating/inhaling it.
Uh, it really is dangerous. That's why nuclear power plants are considered terrorist targets.
That's funny, nuclear plants don't even make my list. On my list are things like planes, train stations, embassies and other government buildings, cafes, malls, and busses.
While you are correct that Chernobyl was a bad design and an ill-conceived experiment started the disaster, do you recall what caused Three Mile Island or what the consequences might have been had the hydrogen bubble ignited?
Do you recall that TMI happened BEFORE Chernobyl, and sparked a quite thorough redesign of reactors to make them safer, and GenIV reactors, if we ever get around to building them, would be safer yet?
And the bigger problem is the cost and various issues with properly sequestering the waste. Using nuclear power is basically like borrowing to run the country - we get the immediate benefit and our children have to pay the price.
First, the stuff is safer than coal - a lot of the pollution from coal actually ends up in the environment. Besides that, I(and many other nuclear proponents) figure we'll be going after that high level waste in less than a hundred years to use it as fuel again. Other options include breeder reactors and reprocessing using modern methods to reduce the amount of waste, and the lifespan of the waste, substantially.
Any idea how much it will cost to pay just for the guards to monitor a waste site for 100,000 years or so? I don't think that is factored into the cost of electricity from a nuclear plant, is it?
How long until the Mercury released by Coal plants exits out of the environment? How long until the CO2 is sequestered again?
And yes - it is factored in. The federal government told the nuclear power plant operators: You WILL pay us $X per megawatt/hour produced. We WILL dispose of the waste. There's lawsuits going on about that one.
But it takes condensing humidity to cause corrosion - and we're unlikely to have it on active servers warmer than their surroundings.
Wasn't there an article a couple weeks ago about a Nevada data center running with no A/C or humitidy control at all? They only experienced about 1% greater failure rates?
A lot of the telephone tolerance stuff first came up back when a lot of the switching was [i]mechanical[/i] in nature. Even after that, you had more analogue stuff, more discrete components, etc...
Now what interests me is that if google are guaranteeing to run these chips at a minimum temperature and therefore could increase the yield by accepting chips that would otherwise have been a failure because they couldn't run at a cold temperature...
Given that CPUs are heat generating devices, and from everything I've heard will operate even in liquid nitrogen, I don't think the cold end is much of an issue.
If your going to be running your computer outside in Antartica* during the winter, at night, all you'd have to do is put a smaller heat sink on it.
*Don't know why, that extra 100 watts is another 100 watts to keep your living area warm.
Did you take into account that the you'd need to double the resistance of the two resistors to get the right resistance?
Rt = 1/(1/R1+1/R2)
Or you could use two half value units in series.
Either way, the price difference between 5% resisters and 10% resisters is generally NOT a factor of 2, so if you need the closer tolerance, just go with a better band. They come in 20%, 10%, 5%, 2%, and 1%.
On the plus size, the resisters on the whole would be able to withstand almost twice as many watts(the lower resistance one would fail first).
Hmmm...
http://www.alliedelec.com/Resistors
10 kohm, .25 W, 5% = $.05 .25 W, 1% = $.12
10 kohm,
Last I looked, 20% margin resisters were hard to find. Now it looks like 10% are hard as well. Still, even at a bit over double the price at that cheap isn't going to gain you much. The extra soldering is going to be a pain.
Somehow, I doubt that very seriously. I don't see gasoline prices dropping significantly in future, no matter what people drive. Demand from China and India will be more than enough to keep prices high from here on out.
Looks at current price posted at gas station... Depends on your definition of 'significant' I guess. Just heard on the radio that some stations are under $3. Oil usage in the USA is actually down 5% this year. It's a first.
Also, I wasn't talking about prices dropping. I was talking about is that if you have millions of urban/suburban types switching to non-liquid petrol vehicles such as EVs, the price won't increase as fast, as people are switching to alternatives due to cost, and therefore keeping demand down, lowering the pressure to increase prices.
As for China/India, oil prices are slamming them even harder. Still, they have a good opportunity to build cities that makes travel without a car easier than with one. And I don't mean by simply making car travel difficult.
You travel at a more leisurely rate than I do.
I cramp up if I sit still for that long. *Shrug*
Note that $10/gallon gasoline will probably shift a lot of my driving to flying, assuming flying costs don't go up proportionally. Which they probably will.
The airlines have been screaming for a while, it does. Still, for longer trips a filled plane is actually a very efficient mode of travel.
And greyhound has been experiencing a revival from what I've heard...
Hell, I might win the Powerball next week (unlikely, I only buy a ticket when the prize if over $100 million, and that won't happen next week), and buy three new cars, all hybrids or HEV's....
Just don't go crazy... Have you seen the rates at which big lotto winners end up declaring bankruptcy?
Averages slightly more often than weekly over the last couple-three years.
Would those trips still occur; be economical at $10/gallon gasoline? Anyways - consider this. You keep your cars, every inner-city type that don't travel long distances that buys a EV will help keep your gasoline costs down.
The ten minute charge thing is to allow me to do those >400 mile trips without an overnight stop. Which is why 30 minutes for a charge is acceptable if the range is 400 miles (enough time for a lunch break after six hours on the road), but ten minutes is required if the range is only 250 miles (less than four hours on the road, and I'm not going to be willing to stop for an extended time, especially since most of my over 400 mile trips are also over 500 miles, and would require two stops).
Going by my 750 mile trips to my parents - I end up stopping 3 times for gas. Driving through the upper midwest I have to judge my stops a bit in order to maintain a reserve between stations, so I generally end up topping off with still having half a tank once due to the way the towns are.
I normally figure 45-60 minutes for lunch, after being in a car for that long I take a nice sit down meal. I've also plotted out starting early, having breakfast around 7-8, then lunch at 12-1, dinner 5-6. At 300 miles a pop(4 hours@75), that's 1200 miles in a day. Call it 800 to have a healthy reserve, 8 hours of sleep, and not precisely placed charging/eating areas.
I was going to buy their dual band n router before the injunction hit because it was one of only 2 dual band Ns available at the time, and the specs were impressive.
May I ask, how often do you engage in a greater than 200 mile trip in a single day?
That said, I'll evaluate the options the next time a car collapses into a black hole, and see what makes sense. It'll depend on which car collapses, and what gasoline prices are like then. And what is available on the market.
At the moment the best you'd likely get would be a hybrid. I'd have the battery checked really good. With the economy the way it is, I figure that buying a non-fuel guzzler used is going to be fairly difficult - the leasing market that used to provide a lot of newer used cars has dried up substantially, people are worried about their jobs and investments, credit is harder to get, thus they're more likely to hold onto any fuel efficient vehicles. The guzzlers are already quite available to the point used car lots can't move them enough to justify buying or accepting them as trade-ins.
I concede your point that you can make EVs popular if you can convince 1% of the population buy one or more of them. I'm not so sure that you can do that, though, without an infrastructure that allows fillups on the road (the ten minute charge I mentioned).
The problem with the 10 minute charge is the fact that you're practically up into the lightning bolt over copper energy range. Unless the car's more like a motorcycle, I don't see it happening.
On the other hand, I figure it'll balance out by people not having to visit a gas station. Plug it in at home, rather than going to a station, running your credit card or prepaying, sitting there while the vehicle fills up. Most vehicles will get a good 8 hours of charge time a night - enough to drop the amps needed down to dryer socket level.
Top it off at work if you want, though I'd imagine the power companies would prefer night charging.
If gas prices get high enough, it'd still be cheaper for most to rent a hybrid or generator trailer for longer trips.
The problem here is that it's still going to end up being an overlong vehicle, assuming nothing odd. It's also going to FUBAR your suspension unless it has it's own axle. Talking with my grandfather, so much as one of those wheelchair lifts/holders is enough weight to do that. Reduces your steering ability, and drive ability if the vehicle is a FWD.
Parking wouldn't be much more difficult - remember, the idea is that it's for long trips. Most areas have spots available for semis along the highway, or you could take two spots.
At that point, swapping the vehicle out for a hybrid would make more sense.
I figured as much. And the EV companies are going to have to try to sell the things to people like me more than to people who are drooling EV fanatics - there aren't enough drooling EV fanatics to justify the assembly line.
I'm far from a drooling EV fanatic. What I am is a techie with a thorough grounding in accounting and economics(both parents accountants, go figure). Thus I find EVs and hybrids very neat - but sadly, not economical.
As for marketing to you - well, they wouldn't necessarily have to reach you, specifically. What they need to do is make it economical for, say, 1% of the population. There's around 135M cars in the USA. Figure a 10 year replacement cycle, on average, that's 13.5M cars sold per year to maintain the same number of vehicles. If 1% go for the EV/Hybrid/whatever, that's 135K vehicles sold - many cars make money on smaller markets.
On a final note, part of my 10X figure was 'what if gasoline prices go back up?'. What if gasoline hit $10/gallon in the not too far future? Even if EVs don't go down in price one cent, every cent gasoline goes up
I value the 500 mile range a LOT. I'd be willing to drop to 400, if the car was otherwise worthwhile, but not below that. And it'd have to be really worthwhile to make me give up that 100 mile cushion. I can afford to keep a vehicle that can get by nicely on 200 miles, but the other two have to be able to handle greater ranges to justify my paying for them.
You're a longer ranged customer, then. I get by fine on 300 miles - and I drive 60+ a day. Heck, I ride my motorcycle a lot and only get 120 miles out of it's tank.
Remember, with an EV or PHEV you don't need to visit the gas station to 'fill up', it can be done from home.
Acceptable charging times: for a commuter car, four hours. For a real car, no more than 30 minutes. And that 30 minutes is only acceptable if the range on a charge is 400+ miles. For shorter range on charge, I'll want charging time on the order of ten minutes, max.
I'm going to use the 200wh/mile figure, and 300 miles as an 'average' range. That'd require a 60kwh battery pack. To fill it in 4 hours, at 220V, would require a bit more than 68 Amps to charge. Call it 100A to charge it up faster in the beginning to make up the slower charging near the end for most battery technologies*. Copper cable rated for 100A is as big around as the average thumb, and modern household services are typically 200A. Certainly doable, just need to hire an electrician to make a heavy duty run to the garage/carport.
For a 30 minute charge - you're looking at 800A@220V. That's getting beyond 'cable' and looking at bars. 10 minutes? 2.4KA tends to melt stuff(not that 800A won't). So you're going to be looking at a special service for the faster charge times, likely 600V or higher to keep the cable size down. You're still talking lots of amps though, even at voltages prone to arcing in the air.
If the EV costs more to own and operate over a five year period, including the car payments, than a gasoline car, I have no use for it. So the difference in operating costs can't push the price higher than the savings on operating costs. Which means the EV really can't be more than a couple-three thousand dollars more than a comparable gasoline car.
Given your emphasis on range, I'd figure you're probably spending $5k or so a year on gasoline. That means it could be $10-15k more than a gasoline car and STILL save money overall.
Part of the economic aspect is that substantial savings can be realized with a pure EV over a hybrid, for those that fit the profile. You probably don't fit that profile - but a 40mpg PHEV that uses 300watt-hours a mile might save you quite a bit of money, especially if gasoline prices shoot up again.
Oh, an
My other cars? One yes, one maybe. Of course, you haven't actually provided any real numbers for price "per gallon" for an EV, so no way to say that those numbers would be realistic.
I was being almost like an economist - feeling out your comfort zone. Just how much do you value that 500 mile range? I wasn't trying for real numbers. Think like a car company feeling out potential customers - how much range to they think they need? How much do they want? What charging time would be acceptable? What would be good? How much are they willing to pay? How much can they save? Etc...
I won't even try to come up with a 'per gallon' rate. Between the volatility of gas prices and the various electric rates it's useless. Instead I'll reduce it down to a common figure that makes sense - cents per mile
One of the things you run into with EV's is that most data is for converted Lead Acid DC motor driven vehicles - commercial vehicles can be a lot more efficient. So I'll use the Tesla. The Tesla Roadster is rated at 200 watt-hours or 5 miles/kwh.
It depends a lot on your electricity cost - which varies more across the country than gasoline. Some people get deals and pay around 5 cents/Kwh. Some people pay 20 or more.
A 32 mpg vehicle will cost 12.5 cents per mile at $4 gallon. At 10 cents a kwh, a Tesla Roadster will cost you 2 cents. At 20(expensive electricity!), it'd be 4 cents.
At 30 cents per gallon gas taxes, that works out to less than a penny per mile(for a 32mpg vehicle). So it'd raise the EV to 3 cents, or still slightly less than a quarter the price of your vehicle per mile. Still less than half for expensive electricity.
As for a surtax for electricity - unless you drive a LOT, any extra electricity surcharge will disappear into the other uses people use electricity for. I drive a lot, and even for me, I'd only use $36 of electricity for my vehicle a month - and that's half my current utility bill. So unless they mandate a separate meter, the tax is going to be problematic.
That's not including extra costs due to batteries, reduced costs because of less maintenance(no oil chances on a electric motor), and assumes taxes and insurance are a wash, of course.
How big is your tank? What's your mpg? How much does a fillup cost?
Would you accept a halving of range if that meant your fillups cost $1/gallon? 30 cents?
I ride my motorcycle quite a bit in the warmer season, and I only have ~120 miles of range with it. On the other hand, fillups not breaking $10 vs $70 for my truck make up for a lot.
They might eventually come out with a cheaper sports car, but that's not currently on their table. They wouldn't be able to make money at the $75k price point at this time for a sports car.
Car companies aren't stupid; they wouldn't sell a car which couldn't make long trips without charging.
GM sold^H^H^H^Hleased the EV1, there's a number EV vans out there for commercial use. They can't make an especially long trip without charging.
How about a generator under the hood, like, say, one of the ones that every plug-in hybrid ever sold or announced has pre-installed?
Two issues: Weight and cost. It's very difficult to make a hybrid with over a hundred mile pure electric range because you have to have the engine and all the assorted support equipment in there instead of batteries. We're talking hundreds of pounds for the engine, the radiator, fuel tank, etc... This reduces range for a given amount of batteries. On the cost front, while a pure hybrid will cost less than a EV + trailer, if EVs take off you could normally get by simply renting a trailer when necessary. Or a more traditional gas-guzzler for that matter.
The price for the roadster itself is unlikely to drop; that's part of it's mystic. Instead they're looking at coming out with more of a 'family' car with actual cargo capacity - but ~half the range at this point.
Part of the Tesla's range is from the sheer number of batteries it takes to provide the current capacity a sports car wants.
You have the same idea of what a 'truck' should be as I do, I have learned from replies that this thing is actually a compact SUV, which makes mildly more sense for skiing at least, but it still is a poor offroader so it's most likely just for display.
I figure it was selected because of all the hybrids out there, the Escape is the only one that could remotely be considered an off-roader or 'inclement weather' vehicle.
If she doesn't use the grid at all to power up the vehicle I'm still not convinced she'll be gaining much apart from through the regenerative braking.
The escape is a purpose built hybrid - that part she didn't retrofit on. What she got for her $35k was a much larger battery pack and some ECU modifications to accomidate it's plug in nature.
I wasn't saying that hybrid is a bad idea in all situations, but personally I'd prefer a fully electric vehicle and have the option to get a roadside recharge or something in an emergency.
Assuming you have some smarts, you'd be able to get a slow emergency recharge anywhere you can get electricity. Being over in Europe, you have the bonus of readily available 220V plugs for even more charging ability.
Assuming you're not a long way from home/destination, you get a bite to eat and can finish the trip.
electric only wouldn't work so well in North America, with the massive mileage most people have to do. I'm pretty sure I could walk right around the perimeter of my city in less than a day - it's not quite the same somewhere like Houston though! And that's just the cities, nevermind the distance between cities..
It's actually pretty lopsided. Something like half of people could do just fine with an EV with a 50 mile range for 95% of their trips. The only problem is that such a vehicle currently costs so much that a pure gas vehicle is cheaper and does 99%.
The difference is one was dealing with paint (inanimate substance) one is dealing with cows (dumb animals), anything dealing with inanimate objects is relatively easy and cheap to automate, anything dealing with animate objects (or irregular objects) is difficult and expensive to automate
Wasn't it not that long ago that we had a article here about automated milking machines, and no longer having to get up early in the morning to milk the herd?
Oops - one correction. I listed the Baker EV's range as a 'few miles'. Per the article, it's actually around a hundred, but the cells have to be chemically refreshed after that - they're a variation of permanent alkelines.
To expand, I remember a story about a car in Leno's garage. At this point, it's around a hundred years old, but it's a 100% EV.
Originally intended for women, it has things like a makeup kit & mirror built in. Only has a few miles range, but is so dead silent that Leno's wife likes to use it to go looking at wildlife - it doesn't scare them.
Here we are.
EV's have as long of a history as IC vehicles - perhaps even longer! Steam engines predate both by a bit, but have fallen out of usage. It's just that in the course of history, EV's couldn't keep up, cost or feature wise, with the Otto cycle except in special circumstances - sealed buildings worried about exhaust, for example. Of course, after re-reading the article, I'm tempted to build a steam car again. ;)
The electric motor is mature, efficient, and durable. The only problem remaining is the energy storage system. If somebody could come up with a battery that holds twice as much power at half the cost, I figure we'd swap the percentages of electric and gasoline vehicles inside of a decade. Gasoline/diesel would be the special purpose.
It's sad that Toyota is waffling about a plug-in Prius; seems to me that they are underestimating the rethink of the two car family: the "urban" electric car for short commutes, and the "guzzler" for distance driving.
I think that it's more along the lines that those $10k+ conversion kits aren't more than 50% more expensive than doing it at the factory, especially when you consider warranty periods and requirements that conversion kits can ignore but auto manufacturers can't.
Basically, the engineers are coming up with numbers that aren't making economical sense for enough customers to be worth it. They probably have some sort of 'gold standard' listing of requirements, and the engineers can't make the range, durability, and charging time while still meeting cost limits.
Sadly, Hybrids still don't make economic sense for most people. Double battery capacity while halving the price, and we'd be in business.