" For heavy pickup trucks, I think hydrogen might make a good compromise."
Just as soon as the embrittlement issues are cracked (unintentional pun).
There's a reason carmakers aren't selling hydrogen cars - they don't want the massive liabilities associated with what happens when the tank system gets older and isn't treated with kid gloves from the outset.
The odds of cancer being generated from alpha emission is slim to almost nonexistent. The typical reaction of a cell hit by alphas is to _die_ and if it doesn't, it will probably be killed by its neighbours.
Polonium-as-a-poison works by exposing someone to high enough doses that large numbers of body cells are killed - it's straight out radiation poisoning, not cancer. That's a dose thousands, if not millions of times higher than the amounts found in a smoker's lungs.
Nuclear radiation doesn't guarantee cancer. If you survive a high dose (and the resulting temporary shutdown of the immune system) then there's a good chance nothing will happen. The increase in the rate of cancers in Hiroshima/Nagasaki blast survivors was less than 2%, as a for-instance.
Weapons plutonium isn't very radioactive (as in - slightly, but not as much as you'd think) - which is why it has such a long halflife.
Some isotopes are more radioactive (and hence have shorter halflives), but you don't want these in a nuke as they cause premature detonation or a fizzle.
Given this is Hanford, the odds are good that the plutonium involved is the former type, not the latter.
Military sites worldwide are responsible for the vast majority of nuclear accidents and pollution.
Civil sites have tended to be risk-averse but military operated reactors and processing plants have always played fast and loose with protocols and safety.
Smokers are exposed to the highest levels of alpha radiation encountered by any group of humans on the planet (polonium), but the vast majority of cancers which develop in ex-smokers seem to be catalysed by the breakdown products of that radiation (berylium features heavily in the decay chain and it's a major carcinogen) rather than the radiation.
"There are peaker plants that are on only when the demand gets high "
Or when you have a high percentage of renewables and they drop out.
The problem is that unless it's worth the owner's while to start the peaker plant, they won't - which is why South Australia suffered major blackouts back in February 2017. The peaker plant wouldn't have run long enough for the income from electricity to pay the cost of starting the plant. It was only when a committement was made to pay enough to cover operational costs that the owners pushed the start button - and THIS is the kind of cost associated with the current model of subsidised production that never gets factored into the equations when they're sold to the public/politicians.
"One way to punch out of this mess is for California to start making hydrogen, and give small hydrogen fueling pumps to any gas station that will take one, and now it becomes possible to sell cars, leading to a possible way forwards."
Hydrogen is an absolute _bitch_ to store. It doesn't just permeate the pipework and escape, it embrittles that pipework (and the cylinders) on the way out - and that's without the added issue of stress cracking caused by constant pressure cycling of the tank and system.
The posters saying that the best thing to do with hydrogen is to use it as soon as it's made weren't doing so for spurious reasons. Even methane (CH4) is difficult to work with in pressurised systems.
Hydrogen cars aren't popular because they're halo projects. They're halo projects because carmakers and fuel vendors don't want the liabilities that come with exploding tanks and associated shrapnel shredding anything that happens to be nearby. They will never be a mass commercial option - if you have the energy to make hydrogen from water (it's usually made by reducing methane) then you have more than enough energy to tack on a few carbon atoms and make propane or octane, which are easier and safer to handle.
"Uranium produced energy has been less toxic so far than solar panels. "
Putting the "nuclear waste" problem in perspective: The output from a single 800-1000MWe PWR or BWR nuclear plant over its 60 year lifespan is almost enough to fill an olympic-size swimming pool and is relatively safe to handle in 300 years (not 200,000)
Thorium cycle systems with continuous chemical processing would eliminate the ~85% waste on the input side (enriching uranium makes a LOT of depleted uranium waste) and the 99% waste on the output side. This would reduce the waste down to about a basketball size per year - again, safe to handle in about 300 years.
Even better, both types of waste along with plutonium and most other waste products from our current crop of reactors can be used as sidestream fuel for the thorium reactor (it's actually reacting U233, but that's produced from thorium fed in as the primary fuel), which means that all the nuclear waste and proliferation problems become less severe. (You can weaponise a thorium reactor, but it's hard and extremely noticeable, unlike current conventional systems.)
Assuming that most energy generation (electrical, heating and transportation, etc) is replaced by thoriusm MSR systems, we have about 200k years supply of thorium readily available so running out isn't likely to be an issue for a while. The US DoE buried a few tens of thousands of tons in the Nevada desert some years back to get rid of the stuff (it's a nuisance byproduct of rare earth mining and because it's barely radioactive, the main reason rare earth mines are uneconomic in the USA and western countries.)
The Oak Ridge Experiment was 50 years ago. This is a technology that's been proven to work, but needs a will to implement.
"chemical batteries degenerate before providing enough charge/discharge cycles to pay for themselves"
Aquion claimed that they have beaten this, but they've gone chapter 11 whilst getting the technology to market - which is a shame considering the battery tech is non-toxic and doesn't burn. Yes it's not dense enough for EVs but density doesn't matter for stationary (traction battery) operations.
"Robotisation" at present makes _white collar_ jobs targets, not blue collar ones.
Up to now the increasing automation in offices has been accommodated by natural attrition (when was the last time you saw a dedicated stenographer, runner, accounts clerk or phone operator in a sub-50 person company?)
AI means the "thinking" jobs (which are almost entirely agorithmic) are now within reach.
Robotisation of mundane stuff like food workers is likely further off - owners are going to find out that whilst they may save wages, there are still substantial costs associated with manual handling of stuff (such as cleaning, and calibration), which means that a mechanical replacement may not pay for itself before it's obsolete.
One of the primarily visible effects of the Robocalypse will be the elimination of the already shrinking middle classes.
The BBC does - via a wholly owned private limited company (TV Licensing Limited), which contracts out actual collections and enforcement to Capita.
Surprisingly (considering Capita is involved) there's a fairly high compliance level and the collection process is reputed to be relatively efficient - that doesn't stop them sending endless demands to people who already have licenses, etc.
"Assuming there is enough water in the river, there is no reason they could not do that during the day while they're experiencing a surplus of solar. "
Apart from the surprising amount of time it takes to move from "generator" to "pump" mode (spin down, reverse, etc) and the waterflow required to keep spinning reserve units operating. To do it the way you're suggesting would probably require dedicated pumping plant and the overall costs of operating most pumped-storage plants are already such that they're only used for peaking work.
Most of the money being plowed into intermittent resources (wind+solar) and providing backup for it would be better put into nuclear plants, with extensive R&D into Molten Salt systems - which unlike conventional nuclear systems can load follow at least as fast as hydro plants. The subsidies paid out to renewables operators each year would easily pay for several nuclear generators of the same size (with more consistent and close-to-nameplate output instead of under 20% over a year(*)) and R&D for molten salt has been starved for 40 years. (MSRs are more-or-less "inherently safe" compared to traditional nuke designs, which in turn are 300,000 times safer than coal and 10 times safer than wind, with even the 1960s experimental design being more or less impossible to abuse in the ways that brought us TMI/Chrnobyl/Fukushima and others and the lack of radioactives in water means far lower risk of nasties getting into the biosphere (Salts freeze at 400C, so any leak will either seal itself or not go far, vs a steam or water leak in current technology. They boil above 1400C, so they don't need pressurisation - no steam explosion risk if things corrode.))
(*) The average 2MW turbine puts out full power for about 14 hours - per YEAR. If you can achieve 400kW average annual output then you're doing extremely well - and of course to match the nameplate output of a 800MW nuke you'll need 400 turbines, but in reality it's more like 2400 turbines, allowing for the 20% and downtime for maintenance. My suspicion is that if MSRs and in particular LFTRs reach commercial viability, wind and solar farms along with battery storage systems will end up as abandoned relics of a past that didn't work out.
Most of these mechanical gas-compression/expansion systems are_extremely_ inefficient.
When a gas is compressed it gets hotter, when it's decompressed it gets colder (Boyle's laws, remember them?)
If you lose heat on the compression storage side, then it usually has to be added back in during decompression or the regulating mechanism freezes up and/or you'll only get half (or less) the expansion you expected.
This issue is why all those "compressed air cars" always turn out to be noisy & expensive toys. The amount of energy practically available from the tanks is far lower than the inventors ever want to admit to and keeping the heat of compression or increasing pressures starts running into engineering stress issues such as the tanks exploding.
Underwater balloons _might_ work if there's sufficient water flow around the balloons to act as a heatsource during decompression but the odds are pretty good that overall efficiency will be extremely low when scaled up to practical sizes (and deepwater is generally only a few degrees above freezing)
Intermittent energy sources are _hard_ on grids and political rules which force grids to take such sources as first priority at high prices has led to situations such as South Australia's February blackouts where renewables dropped out but were predicted to come back quickly - too quickly for a backup power plant to pay its firing-up costs, so the company operating it declined to hit the start button.
South Australia is a canary for what may happen to the rest of the world.
Intermittents are heavily subsidised both directly (government funding, preferential feed-in tarriffs) and indirectly (not having to pay for grid rebuilds to handle highly complex+unpredictable power flows, plus not having to pay for backup fossil-fuel plants - which cost a lot in maintenance to run even if they're sitting idle 95% of the time).
California's decision to force storage systems is a good thing and other jurisdictions will follow through sooner rather than later - preferably with the costs of this being handed back to the generators. You will hear the screaming from wind operators about this in particular as large turbines have a nasty habit of shredding their gearboxes or catching fire, to the point where even with subsidies the only way to reliably make money from them is to keep them stationary and collect payments from the operators to not connect to the grid (The going rate in the UK for this is ~UKP 30k per month per 2MW turbine)
Pumped-hydro is about the most ideal form of grid storage, but there are suitable locations left to build such things.
Batteries _seem_ the next obvious choice (Aquion's sodium/"saltwater" batteries seem better suited than LiIon - better deep discharge characteristics and not a fire risk, with flow batteries being brilliant for GW-scale systems), but I was surprised to see how far flywheel storage has evolved in the last 20 years. The flywheel systems I'm familiar with are only good for 30 seconds or so, but some of the newer designs are intended to hold the output of a medium-large solar farm for 4-6 hours and feedin when grid demand is highest.
It's already happening across europe. You're now paying network charges and separate energy charges - and in most cases except heavy users the monthly network charge is higher than the energy one. (The network charge is 60% of my power bill)
What this achieves is making it even more tempting to fit bigger batteries and a generator for bridging purposes and cut the cord completely.
Apart from global warming (which many claim is a scam, I don't), there's a bigger uglier far scarier monster in the closet that comes along with global CO2 atmospheric spikes: Anoxic oceanic events. Look them up.
There's also a fairly angry elephant in the room even if we dodge the Anoxia bullet: As a result of the increased CO2 levels, Ocean acidity has increased 30% in the last 200 years (Ph is a log scale) and is far enough acid to already be interfering with formation of corals and shells. This is "double-plus ungood" given that it means that everything from zooplankton upwards is affected and may result in a food chain collapse.
There's also the slight problem of the Leptav Sea methane emissions (look them up) and the possiblity of 1-5GT of methane clathrates bubbling out if they're not stabilised. This is a Storegga-scale event with associated tsunamis and that much methane released in that short a period would have an effect not unlike what happened when the Storegga slides happened at the start of this interglacial ~9500 years ago. (That slight kick in temperatures, ocean levels and CO levels 9-10k years ago? THAT was Storegga and its aftermath)
How many PWR nuke plants could you get for $4billion (even if the answer is "one", you'll get far more actual GWhs out of it than spending $4billion on solar/wind will get you)
The amount of money spent on wind and solar would give 10-20 times as much available energy if it went into nuclear. I just wish LFTRs would hurry up off the drawing board and back into prototype stage (we already had a U233 MSR reactor 50 years ago, why is it so hard to redo the past?)
Slashdot Mirror
" For heavy pickup trucks, I think hydrogen might make a good compromise."
Just as soon as the embrittlement issues are cracked (unintentional pun).
There's a reason carmakers aren't selling hydrogen cars - they don't want the massive liabilities associated with what happens when the tank system gets older and isn't treated with kid gloves from the outset.
The odds of cancer being generated from alpha emission is slim to almost nonexistent. The typical reaction of a cell hit by alphas is to _die_ and if it doesn't, it will probably be killed by its neighbours.
Polonium-as-a-poison works by exposing someone to high enough doses that large numbers of body cells are killed - it's straight out radiation poisoning, not cancer. That's a dose thousands, if not millions of times higher than the amounts found in a smoker's lungs.
Nuclear radiation doesn't guarantee cancer. If you survive a high dose (and the resulting temporary shutdown of the immune system) then there's a good chance nothing will happen. The increase in the rate of cancers in Hiroshima/Nagasaki blast survivors was less than 2%, as a for-instance.
Weapons plutonium isn't very radioactive (as in - slightly, but not as much as you'd think) - which is why it has such a long halflife.
Some isotopes are more radioactive (and hence have shorter halflives), but you don't want these in a nuke as they cause premature detonation or a fizzle.
Given this is Hanford, the odds are good that the plutonium involved is the former type, not the latter.
Military sites worldwide are responsible for the vast majority of nuclear accidents and pollution.
Civil sites have tended to be risk-averse but military operated reactors and processing plants have always played fast and loose with protocols and safety.
Smokers are exposed to the highest levels of alpha radiation encountered by any group of humans on the planet (polonium), but the vast majority of cancers which develop in ex-smokers seem to be catalysed by the breakdown products of that radiation (berylium features heavily in the decay chain and it's a major carcinogen) rather than the radiation.
"There are peaker plants that are on only when the demand gets high "
Or when you have a high percentage of renewables and they drop out.
The problem is that unless it's worth the owner's while to start the peaker plant, they won't - which is why South Australia suffered major blackouts back in February 2017.
The peaker plant wouldn't have run long enough for the income from electricity to pay the cost of starting the plant. It was only when a committement was made to pay enough to cover operational costs that the owners pushed the start button - and THIS is the kind of cost associated with the current model of subsidised production that never gets factored into the equations when they're sold to the public/politicians.
"One way to punch out of this mess is for California to start making hydrogen, and give small hydrogen fueling pumps to any gas station that will take one, and now it becomes possible to sell cars, leading to a possible way forwards."
Hydrogen is an absolute _bitch_ to store. It doesn't just permeate the pipework and escape, it embrittles that pipework (and the cylinders) on the way out - and that's without the added issue of stress cracking caused by constant pressure cycling of the tank and system.
The posters saying that the best thing to do with hydrogen is to use it as soon as it's made weren't doing so for spurious reasons. Even methane (CH4) is difficult to work with in pressurised systems.
Hydrogen cars aren't popular because they're halo projects. They're halo projects because carmakers and fuel vendors don't want the liabilities that come with exploding tanks and associated shrapnel shredding anything that happens to be nearby. They will never be a mass commercial option - if you have the energy to make hydrogen from water (it's usually made by reducing methane) then you have more than enough energy to tack on a few carbon atoms and make propane or octane, which are easier and safer to handle.
"The greatest electricity demand is on hot days, during the daytime. You can equate solar energy with air conditioners."
And with sensible building designs you can cut down power demand from ACs instead of having to brute-force the cooling.
Power prices will rise to ensure that anyway
"Uranium produced energy has been less toxic so far than solar panels. "
Putting the "nuclear waste" problem in perspective: The output from a single 800-1000MWe PWR or BWR nuclear plant over its 60 year lifespan is almost enough to fill an olympic-size swimming pool and is relatively safe to handle in 300 years (not 200,000)
Thorium cycle systems with continuous chemical processing would eliminate the ~85% waste on the input side (enriching uranium makes a LOT of depleted uranium waste) and the 99% waste on the output side. This would reduce the waste down to about a basketball size per year - again, safe to handle in about 300 years.
Even better, both types of waste along with plutonium and most other waste products from our current crop of reactors can be used as sidestream fuel for the thorium reactor (it's actually reacting U233, but that's produced from thorium fed in as the primary fuel), which means that all the nuclear waste and proliferation problems become less severe. (You can weaponise a thorium reactor, but it's hard and extremely noticeable, unlike current conventional systems.)
Assuming that most energy generation (electrical, heating and transportation, etc) is replaced by thoriusm MSR systems, we have about 200k years supply of thorium readily available so running out isn't likely to be an issue for a while. The US DoE buried a few tens of thousands of tons in the Nevada desert some years back to get rid of the stuff (it's a nuisance byproduct of rare earth mining and because it's barely radioactive, the main reason rare earth mines are uneconomic in the USA and western countries.)
The Oak Ridge Experiment was 50 years ago. This is a technology that's been proven to work, but needs a will to implement.
"chemical batteries degenerate before providing enough charge/discharge cycles to pay for themselves"
Aquion claimed that they have beaten this, but they've gone chapter 11 whilst getting the technology to market - which is a shame considering the battery tech is non-toxic and doesn't burn. Yes it's not dense enough for EVs but density doesn't matter for stationary (traction battery) operations.
This is one of the interesting conundrums.
"Robotisation" at present makes _white collar_ jobs targets, not blue collar ones.
Up to now the increasing automation in offices has been accommodated by natural attrition (when was the last time you saw a dedicated stenographer, runner, accounts clerk or phone operator in a sub-50 person company?)
AI means the "thinking" jobs (which are almost entirely agorithmic) are now within reach.
Robotisation of mundane stuff like food workers is likely further off - owners are going to find out that whilst they may save wages, there are still substantial costs associated with manual handling of stuff (such as cleaning, and calibration), which means that a mechanical replacement may not pay for itself before it's obsolete.
One of the primarily visible effects of the Robocalypse will be the elimination of the already shrinking middle classes.
If you can be jailed for criticising its stories, then it's state-run.
The BBC does - via a wholly owned private limited company (TV Licensing Limited), which contracts out actual collections and enforcement to Capita.
Surprisingly (considering Capita is involved) there's a fairly high compliance level and the collection process is reputed to be relatively efficient - that doesn't stop them sending endless demands to people who already have licenses, etc.
"Assuming there is enough water in the river, there is no reason they could not do that during the day while they're experiencing a surplus of solar. "
Apart from the surprising amount of time it takes to move from "generator" to "pump" mode (spin down, reverse, etc) and the waterflow required to keep spinning reserve units operating. To do it the way you're suggesting would probably require dedicated pumping plant and the overall costs of operating most pumped-storage plants are already such that they're only used for peaking work.
Most of the money being plowed into intermittent resources (wind+solar) and providing backup for it would be better put into nuclear plants, with extensive R&D into Molten Salt systems - which unlike conventional nuclear systems can load follow at least as fast as hydro plants. The subsidies paid out to renewables operators each year would easily pay for several nuclear generators of the same size (with more consistent and close-to-nameplate output instead of under 20% over a year(*)) and R&D for molten salt has been starved for 40 years. (MSRs are more-or-less "inherently safe" compared to traditional nuke designs, which in turn are 300,000 times safer than coal and 10 times safer than wind, with even the 1960s experimental design being more or less impossible to abuse in the ways that brought us TMI/Chrnobyl/Fukushima and others and the lack of radioactives in water means far lower risk of nasties getting into the biosphere (Salts freeze at 400C, so any leak will either seal itself or not go far, vs a steam or water leak in current technology. They boil above 1400C, so they don't need pressurisation - no steam explosion risk if things corrode.))
(*) The average 2MW turbine puts out full power for about 14 hours - per YEAR. If you can achieve 400kW average annual output then you're doing extremely well - and of course to match the nameplate output of a 800MW nuke you'll need 400 turbines, but in reality it's more like 2400 turbines, allowing for the 20% and downtime for maintenance. My suspicion is that if MSRs and in particular LFTRs reach commercial viability, wind and solar farms along with battery storage systems will end up as abandoned relics of a past that didn't work out.
Most of these mechanical gas-compression/expansion systems are_extremely_ inefficient.
When a gas is compressed it gets hotter, when it's decompressed it gets colder (Boyle's laws, remember them?)
If you lose heat on the compression storage side, then it usually has to be added back in during decompression or the regulating mechanism freezes up and/or you'll only get half (or less) the expansion you expected.
This issue is why all those "compressed air cars" always turn out to be noisy & expensive toys. The amount of energy practically available from the tanks is far lower than the inventors ever want to admit to and keeping the heat of compression or increasing pressures starts running into engineering stress issues such as the tanks exploding.
Underwater balloons _might_ work if there's sufficient water flow around the balloons to act as a heatsource during decompression but the odds are pretty good that overall efficiency will be extremely low when scaled up to practical sizes (and deepwater is generally only a few degrees above freezing)
Surprisingly, California has a several mature pumped-storage systems including one tied into the Oroville dam (the one that was in the news recently).
Intermittent energy sources are _hard_ on grids and political rules which force grids to take such sources as first priority at high prices has led to situations such as South Australia's February blackouts where renewables dropped out but were predicted to come back quickly - too quickly for a backup power plant to pay its firing-up costs, so the company operating it declined to hit the start button.
South Australia is a canary for what may happen to the rest of the world.
Intermittents are heavily subsidised both directly (government funding, preferential feed-in tarriffs) and indirectly (not having to pay for grid rebuilds to handle highly complex+unpredictable power flows, plus not having to pay for backup fossil-fuel plants - which cost a lot in maintenance to run even if they're sitting idle 95% of the time).
California's decision to force storage systems is a good thing and other jurisdictions will follow through sooner rather than later - preferably with the costs of this being handed back to the generators. You will hear the screaming from wind operators about this in particular as large turbines have a nasty habit of shredding their gearboxes or catching fire, to the point where even with subsidies the only way to reliably make money from them is to keep them stationary and collect payments from the operators to not connect to the grid (The going rate in the UK for this is ~UKP 30k per month per 2MW turbine)
Pumped-hydro is about the most ideal form of grid storage, but there are suitable locations left to build such things.
Batteries _seem_ the next obvious choice (Aquion's sodium/"saltwater" batteries seem better suited than LiIon - better deep discharge characteristics and not a fire risk, with flow batteries being brilliant for GW-scale systems), but I was surprised to see how far flywheel storage has evolved in the last 20 years. The flywheel systems I'm familiar with are only good for 30 seconds or so, but some of the newer designs are intended to hold the output of a medium-large solar farm for 4-6 hours and feedin when grid demand is highest.
It's already happening across europe. You're now paying network charges and separate energy charges - and in most cases except heavy users the monthly network charge is higher than the energy one. (The network charge is 60% of my power bill)
What this achieves is making it even more tempting to fit bigger batteries and a generator for bridging purposes and cut the cord completely.
"I do bring them home and put them into the recycling bin"
Oh FFS
WHY NOT REFILL THEM?
Doesn't solve the atmospheric CO2 problem though.
Apart from global warming (which many claim is a scam, I don't), there's a bigger uglier far scarier monster in the closet that comes along with global CO2 atmospheric spikes: Anoxic oceanic events. Look them up.
There's also a fairly angry elephant in the room even if we dodge the Anoxia bullet: As a result of the increased CO2 levels, Ocean acidity has increased 30% in the last 200 years (Ph is a log scale) and is far enough acid to already be interfering with formation of corals and shells. This is "double-plus ungood" given that it means that everything from zooplankton upwards is affected and may result in a food chain collapse.
There's also the slight problem of the Leptav Sea methane emissions (look them up) and the possiblity of 1-5GT of methane clathrates bubbling out if they're not stabilised. This is a Storegga-scale event with associated tsunamis and that much methane released in that short a period would have an effect not unlike what happened when the Storegga slides happened at the start of this interglacial ~9500 years ago. (That slight kick in temperatures, ocean levels and CO levels 9-10k years ago? THAT was Storegga and its aftermath)
"Given the massive glut of natural gas in the USA right now, neither coal or nuclear make much sense."
Until the gas runs out.
The problem with THAT is that you need the nuke plants ready _when_ gas prices start climbing rapidly, not several years afterwards.
How many PWR nuke plants could you get for $4billion (even if the answer is "one", you'll get far more actual GWhs out of it than spending $4billion on solar/wind will get you)
"Don't tell that part about gasification can't pay for itself to Eastman Chemical. "
I won't. The point missed is that gasifying coal to burn the products is uneconomic, not using coal as a feedstock for chemical synthesis processes.
(OIl has huge importance for this too. in future times our descendants are going to ask "What the hell do you mean they BURNED oil for heating?")
The amount of money spent on wind and solar would give 10-20 times as much available energy if it went into nuclear. I just wish LFTRs would hurry up off the drawing board and back into prototype stage (we already had a U233 MSR reactor 50 years ago, why is it so hard to redo the past?)
I'm assuming they aren't offering to pay the EFF a large donation to cover their legal bills and some form of compensation to Wagner?
No? In that case, they won.