I left NY before the end of the Giuliani years but compared to before, the NYC subway system *has* gotten a lot less scary. Bloomberg seems to have done a bit of backsliding on crime but it certainly is a lot better than the Dinkins years. NYC does have a mass transit system, one of the nation's oldest and most developed so I don't quite get what your complaint is there. It's got urban and suburban buses, urban subways and 3 suburban train companies (Metro North, LIRR, and the PATH trains to New Jersey) not to mention being part of Amtrack's NE corridor.
Your point about schedules does bring up a major problem with mass transit, that it is centrally planned and doesn't seem to always fit with the reality of who has to go where. Scheduling and placement are also a function of politics. Arrayed against creating new train systems is a formidable political alliance of no-growth advocates, hysterical environmentalists, property value maniacs (trains will let the riff-raff into the neighborhood which is why Georgetown in DC doesn't have a metra station), and taxpayer groups. Combine all that with a legal system that makes it easy to sue to stop something but doesn't carry major consequences if you lose the suit and you have a system that is designed for stagnation. You can't change people's opinions of their interests but you can change the laws that let them hold progress hostage via lawsuit.
The largest international trade fight going on is over food subsidies and how they increase 3rd world poverty because the things that they can do well (like grow sugar) are basically shut out of their best potential markets (the 1st world) because of 1st world food subsidies.
I don't think subsidy is precisely equivalent to government control. If it were, you would have to count a lot more of the world as socialist than is conventionally done today. In any case, we both seem to agree that less subsidy and government interference (absent private criminality) is better so I'm content.
GM is going to have to create a replacement for a 6 cylinder platform around 2006 that has reached the end of its life. Their fuel cell product is a contender to be that replacement. Assuming you're a relatively healthy working age geek, you're likely to live to see it. I'm betting they go for it and we'll see them in showrooms around 2008 for the 2009 model year.
I remember about 5 years ago them being frustrated at only being able to get 150 miles in a fuel cell car. going from 150 to 250 in about 5 years is significant progress in my book. That last 50-100 of range improvement could realistically happen in the next 3 years (when GM has to make its decision).
I did a bit of googling myself and apparently the NECAR 4 from Daimler Chrysler had a 280 mile range in 1999. Somehow, I think they might have squeezed another 20 miles out of the thing in the intervening 4 years.
google up 'pebble bed reactor' and you will find that current cutting edge designs take small uranium 235 balls and coat them in a rugged heat resistant cladding that has a higher melting temperature than the heat produced when the coolant all goes away and they're just sitting in air.
Bottom line, a catastrophic coolant failure results in zero meltdown.
Actually, the hardest part is getting lift prices down to $100/kg. You can solve all the problems you want but if it's too expensive to loft, you haven't got anything usable.
What's holding things up is reliable space transport at $100-$200/kg. Keep an eye on the space elevator folks. If they actually fly, orbital power stations won't be far behind.
At $40,000 a station, the US government could produce a web of stations around 300 miles apart to jumpstart the use of hydrogen cars. The cost would be under $20M (I did the calcs for a previous hydrogen story on slashdot). Count up the number of Interstate miles and divide by 300. You don't need a hydrogen pump at every gas station, just enough so that people can take summer vacations without worrying about where to fuel up.
For homes with natural gas, it's likely H cars will be offered H production kits that run off the house's gas so you can fuel at home for regular commutes. The web of government funded H stations means that you can get fuel as long as you don't stray too far from the highways (which many people do anyway when they're travelling) and as laggards see their competitors improving their profits with their govt. funded hydrogen pumps they'll start to pony up their own $40k to compete. At that point, the govt. can get out of the infrastructure business and let private enterprise take over.
The production costs for hydrogen will be highly variable because there will be multiple sources of the stuff. No doubt hog farmers will have a nice side line of taking their (expensive to dispose of) pig waste and turning it into hydrogen. Depending on transport costs, every hog farm in the country might be the lowest cost hydrogen producer for 10 or 20 miles around. BP and Exxon will buy local instead of transporting. Instead of burning off methane from the nation's garbage dumps, the company given the management contract for that could convert that to hydrogen for sale and be the low cost producer for half a mile around (again, depending on transport costs).
In short, there are a lot of waste streams that turn into revenue streams in a hydrogen economy and the energy picture is going to get a lot more complicated. I think that simplistic cost calculations just aren't going to work.
With bacteria produced hydrogen looking like it's a contender, there might be zero electricity needed to produce H2 in some climates. But bio-hydrogen is likely to require a lot of space so that's not going to work except in rural areas and in some of the more wide open suburbs. Urban areas are likely to see other solutions and that's where small, modular pebble bed nuke plants might come into their own.
Can you argue that electricity is more vital than food? Of course not as people survive without electricity to this day but take away food for a month or two and people are dropping dead all over. Now we've had government controlled food production v. private food production comparisons for decades. It's pretty obvious which system won on that score. I think that power production, because it was usually done far from the consumption point and required extensive rights of way and massive investment legitimately had a government role in the beginning. But times change and we're on the verge of a multi-fuel future where a lot of energy can be produced locally and electricity can be generated in a micro-turbine the size of a refrigerator and power a neighborhood.
The case for privatization grows stronger every year because necessity will change our energy infrastructure to have a great many providers and the days of monopoly will be over.
The nuclear fuel is kept in small, sub-critical mass pellets that are cladded in a very durable, heat resistant containment material. The stuff is currently called a pebble bed reactor (google it and look up the facts) and the initiative seems to be to make the already demonstrated technology modular so that you can easily scale a plant and scale it in small steps (thus probably at low cost points).
In open air, with no cooling systems whatsoever, these things heat up to 1200C. The cladding has a melting point of 1500C so there can be no meltdown and a terrorist bomb would just scatter the cladding covered uranium bocce sized balls around.
There are several schemes out there to bind hydrogen to something relatively stable that will shed the hydrogen easily when needed for fuel. From the title on, the piece was a hatchet job. You can't expect them to get the science exactly right now can you?
Internal combustion engines (30% max) are much less efficient than fuel cells (75% max) so you might just want to take that into consideration. Both figures, btw. are generally lower in real world applications and the fuel cells are too costly today to roll out en masse. The difference between the two solutions is rapidly shrinking and we're already starting to see some fuel cell products out on the market (Coleman's shipping some already).
Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead is exactly what you get when you have decades of bad faith on the part of your political opponents. The left was the majority for decades and they grew arrogant with power so you end up with fiery conservatives who are tired of playing Charlie Brown and the football with the Democrats playing the part of Lucy.
I call BS. GM has hydrogen cars in the 200-250 mile range on a full tank today. They need to get 300 for the car to be practical. Look up the AUTOnomy concept car that GM put out last year and the follow on cars in the current cycle of car shows.
There's a lot of productive work going on out there for hydrogen storage. Somebody even figured out how to use borax (which the US apparently has in huge quantities) as a hydrogen carrier and there was a prototype shown this year running that.
Everybody trots out European mass transit as if it's the solution. Here's a clue, mass transit works in Europe because Europe has 10x the population density of the United States. We have 285M people in the US. If we could figure out how to americanize them fast enough, we could open up the borders and let 2.5 B people in to make mass transit just as practical.
Until you figure out how to do that, why not leave mass transit for the countries (and for the US zones) where population density makes it a reasonable alternative.
The Chernobyl system wasn't obsolete. It was friggin insane from the beginning. It was a design that sacrificed safety for the ability to produce weapons grade fissile material. The US has three such plants and people worry about them specifically because they know that they're not as safe a design. In the USSR, all nuclear plants were graphite so no sneak attack could quickly decapitate the USSR's ability to make more nuclear weapons.
To top off this proliferation nightmare, they didn't put containment structures around them. It's not that shoddy Soviet constructon failed, it's that the engineers never put containment in the design in the first place.
Will we ever see another country ever behave so irresponsibly with its reactors? I doubt it.
It doesn't matter if there's an explosion. The reason these new designs are safe is that the uranium is clad in a moderating substance like a multi-layer ball (golf ball or baseball for example). If the balls aren't held next to each other in the proper geometry, they just sit there and are hot. The melting point of the cladding is hundreds of degrees higher than the heat generated by a dispersed set of balls.
Sure, you need a suitably clothed crew to come pick those balls up but you're not going to have a melt down or something like that.
The 10,000 year figure is a political one but you shouldn't laugh at it. It's the time out in the future at which the number of protesters drop below the critical number necessary to pass the legislation and actually get it done. The actual time needed for containment isn't as important as making people feel secure enough that they let something get done to solve the very real problem of no permanent storage facility for high level nuclear waste.
You can justify the engineering need all you want but a century or two just isn't enough to overcome the massive FUD against radioactive waste.
The thing is that there's a lot of waste out there that is just waiting to be converted to energy. Hydrogen may just be a store of energy but don't sell that short. There's a lot of pollution reduction (lead and other poisonous substances) that would accompany the transfer over to hydrogen.
As for breeder reactors? I'm guessing that Yucca Mountain will end up being empty after a century or two as people get over the nuclear proliferation fears and the 'waste' of a century ago turns into a significant fuel source during their era.
Re:Importance of research and computer modeling
on
Nucular Hydrogen Economy
·
· Score: 2, Informative
The pebble bed reactor designs are already being constructed (there's a S. African plant going up now). The R&D that's left to do is shrinking the whole thing down and making it modular so if you want more juice for your town, you just add a box or two.
Did you 'burn' the hydrogen in that comparison or did you use a fuel cell? what were the comparative efficiencies of the fuel cell v. the methane burning engine if you could remember?
Internal combustion engines have a low efficiency limit. Fuel cells are much more efficient and their efficiency growth is much more rapid that internal combustion engine efficiency growth.
Looking around in our day to day lives, it would be easier to enumerate the stuff around us that doesn't have hydrogen than the stuff that does. It's a very common element and widely available. I think the entire point of President Bush's naming all his hydrogen initiatives 'Freedom' is that we're no longer going to be dependent on any one source for any of our energy. This is inherently empowering and increases our freedom. Remember the Freedom Car initiative? I'm guessing that this theme will continue.
Slashdot Mirror
I left NY before the end of the Giuliani years but compared to before, the NYC subway system *has* gotten a lot less scary. Bloomberg seems to have done a bit of backsliding on crime but it certainly is a lot better than the Dinkins years. NYC does have a mass transit system, one of the nation's oldest and most developed so I don't quite get what your complaint is there. It's got urban and suburban buses, urban subways and 3 suburban train companies (Metro North, LIRR, and the PATH trains to New Jersey) not to mention being part of Amtrack's NE corridor.
Your point about schedules does bring up a major problem with mass transit, that it is centrally planned and doesn't seem to always fit with the reality of who has to go where. Scheduling and placement are also a function of politics. Arrayed against creating new train systems is a formidable political alliance of no-growth advocates, hysterical environmentalists, property value maniacs (trains will let the riff-raff into the neighborhood which is why Georgetown in DC doesn't have a metra station), and taxpayer groups. Combine all that with a legal system that makes it easy to sue to stop something but doesn't carry major consequences if you lose the suit and you have a system that is designed for stagnation. You can't change people's opinions of their interests but you can change the laws that let them hold progress hostage via lawsuit.
The largest international trade fight going on is over food subsidies and how they increase 3rd world poverty because the things that they can do well (like grow sugar) are basically shut out of their best potential markets (the 1st world) because of 1st world food subsidies.
I don't think subsidy is precisely equivalent to government control. If it were, you would have to count a lot more of the world as socialist than is conventionally done today. In any case, we both seem to agree that less subsidy and government interference (absent private criminality) is better so I'm content.
GM is going to have to create a replacement for a 6 cylinder platform around 2006 that has reached the end of its life. Their fuel cell product is a contender to be that replacement. Assuming you're a relatively healthy working age geek, you're likely to live to see it. I'm betting they go for it and we'll see them in showrooms around 2008 for the 2009 model year.
I remember about 5 years ago them being frustrated at only being able to get 150 miles in a fuel cell car. going from 150 to 250 in about 5 years is significant progress in my book. That last 50-100 of range improvement could realistically happen in the next 3 years (when GM has to make its decision).
I did a bit of googling myself and apparently the NECAR 4 from Daimler Chrysler had a 280 mile range in 1999. Somehow, I think they might have squeezed another 20 miles out of the thing in the intervening 4 years.
Your calculations are just wrong then. Fuel cells have no combustion. It's an entirely different process.
google up 'pebble bed reactor' and you will find that current cutting edge designs take small uranium 235 balls and coat them in a rugged heat resistant cladding that has a higher melting temperature than the heat produced when the coolant all goes away and they're just sitting in air.
Bottom line, a catastrophic coolant failure results in zero meltdown.
Actually, the hardest part is getting lift prices down to $100/kg. You can solve all the problems you want but if it's too expensive to loft, you haven't got anything usable.
What's holding things up is reliable space transport at $100-$200/kg. Keep an eye on the space elevator folks. If they actually fly, orbital power stations won't be far behind.
At $40,000 a station, the US government could produce a web of stations around 300 miles apart to jumpstart the use of hydrogen cars. The cost would be under $20M (I did the calcs for a previous hydrogen story on slashdot). Count up the number of Interstate miles and divide by 300. You don't need a hydrogen pump at every gas station, just enough so that people can take summer vacations without worrying about where to fuel up.
For homes with natural gas, it's likely H cars will be offered H production kits that run off the house's gas so you can fuel at home for regular commutes. The web of government funded H stations means that you can get fuel as long as you don't stray too far from the highways (which many people do anyway when they're travelling) and as laggards see their competitors improving their profits with their govt. funded hydrogen pumps they'll start to pony up their own $40k to compete. At that point, the govt. can get out of the infrastructure business and let private enterprise take over.
The production costs for hydrogen will be highly variable because there will be multiple sources of the stuff. No doubt hog farmers will have a nice side line of taking their (expensive to dispose of) pig waste and turning it into hydrogen. Depending on transport costs, every hog farm in the country might be the lowest cost hydrogen producer for 10 or 20 miles around. BP and Exxon will buy local instead of transporting. Instead of burning off methane from the nation's garbage dumps, the company given the management contract for that could convert that to hydrogen for sale and be the low cost producer for half a mile around (again, depending on transport costs).
In short, there are a lot of waste streams that turn into revenue streams in a hydrogen economy and the energy picture is going to get a lot more complicated. I think that simplistic cost calculations just aren't going to work.
With bacteria produced hydrogen looking like it's a contender, there might be zero electricity needed to produce H2 in some climates. But bio-hydrogen is likely to require a lot of space so that's not going to work except in rural areas and in some of the more wide open suburbs. Urban areas are likely to see other solutions and that's where small, modular pebble bed nuke plants might come into their own.
Can you argue that electricity is more vital than food? Of course not as people survive without electricity to this day but take away food for a month or two and people are dropping dead all over. Now we've had government controlled food production v. private food production comparisons for decades. It's pretty obvious which system won on that score. I think that power production, because it was usually done far from the consumption point and required extensive rights of way and massive investment legitimately had a government role in the beginning. But times change and we're on the verge of a multi-fuel future where a lot of energy can be produced locally and electricity can be generated in a micro-turbine the size of a refrigerator and power a neighborhood.
The case for privatization grows stronger every year because necessity will change our energy infrastructure to have a great many providers and the days of monopoly will be over.
The nuclear fuel is kept in small, sub-critical mass pellets that are cladded in a very durable, heat resistant containment material. The stuff is currently called a pebble bed reactor (google it and look up the facts) and the initiative seems to be to make the already demonstrated technology modular so that you can easily scale a plant and scale it in small steps (thus probably at low cost points).
In open air, with no cooling systems whatsoever, these things heat up to 1200C. The cladding has a melting point of 1500C so there can be no meltdown and a terrorist bomb would just scatter the cladding covered uranium bocce sized balls around.
There are several schemes out there to bind hydrogen to something relatively stable that will shed the hydrogen easily when needed for fuel. From the title on, the piece was a hatchet job. You can't expect them to get the science exactly right now can you?
Internal combustion engines (30% max) are much less efficient than fuel cells (75% max) so you might just want to take that into consideration. Both figures, btw. are generally lower in real world applications and the fuel cells are too costly today to roll out en masse. The difference between the two solutions is rapidly shrinking and we're already starting to see some fuel cell products out on the market (Coleman's shipping some already).
Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead is exactly what you get when you have decades of bad faith on the part of your political opponents. The left was the majority for decades and they grew arrogant with power so you end up with fiery conservatives who are tired of playing Charlie Brown and the football with the Democrats playing the part of Lucy.
I call BS. GM has hydrogen cars in the 200-250 mile range on a full tank today. They need to get 300 for the car to be practical. Look up the AUTOnomy concept car that GM put out last year and the follow on cars in the current cycle of car shows.
There's a lot of productive work going on out there for hydrogen storage. Somebody even figured out how to use borax (which the US apparently has in huge quantities) as a hydrogen carrier and there was a prototype shown this year running that.
Everybody trots out European mass transit as if it's the solution. Here's a clue, mass transit works in Europe because Europe has 10x the population density of the United States. We have 285M people in the US. If we could figure out how to americanize them fast enough, we could open up the borders and let 2.5 B people in to make mass transit just as practical.
Until you figure out how to do that, why not leave mass transit for the countries (and for the US zones) where population density makes it a reasonable alternative.
The Chernobyl system wasn't obsolete. It was friggin insane from the beginning. It was a design that sacrificed safety for the ability to produce weapons grade fissile material. The US has three such plants and people worry about them specifically because they know that they're not as safe a design. In the USSR, all nuclear plants were graphite so no sneak attack could quickly decapitate the USSR's ability to make more nuclear weapons.
To top off this proliferation nightmare, they didn't put containment structures around them. It's not that shoddy Soviet constructon failed, it's that the engineers never put containment in the design in the first place.
Will we ever see another country ever behave so irresponsibly with its reactors? I doubt it.
It doesn't matter if there's an explosion. The reason these new designs are safe is that the uranium is clad in a moderating substance like a multi-layer ball (golf ball or baseball for example). If the balls aren't held next to each other in the proper geometry, they just sit there and are hot. The melting point of the cladding is hundreds of degrees higher than the heat generated by a dispersed set of balls.
Sure, you need a suitably clothed crew to come pick those balls up but you're not going to have a melt down or something like that.
I'm sure President Carter would disagree as he famously pronounced it exactly the same way President Bush does.
The 10,000 year figure is a political one but you shouldn't laugh at it. It's the time out in the future at which the number of protesters drop below the critical number necessary to pass the legislation and actually get it done. The actual time needed for containment isn't as important as making people feel secure enough that they let something get done to solve the very real problem of no permanent storage facility for high level nuclear waste.
You can justify the engineering need all you want but a century or two just isn't enough to overcome the massive FUD against radioactive waste.
The thing is that there's a lot of waste out there that is just waiting to be converted to energy. Hydrogen may just be a store of energy but don't sell that short. There's a lot of pollution reduction (lead and other poisonous substances) that would accompany the transfer over to hydrogen.
As for breeder reactors? I'm guessing that Yucca Mountain will end up being empty after a century or two as people get over the nuclear proliferation fears and the 'waste' of a century ago turns into a significant fuel source during their era.
The pebble bed reactor designs are already being constructed (there's a S. African plant going up now). The R&D that's left to do is shrinking the whole thing down and making it modular so if you want more juice for your town, you just add a box or two.
Did you 'burn' the hydrogen in that comparison or did you use a fuel cell? what were the comparative efficiencies of the fuel cell v. the methane burning engine if you could remember?
Internal combustion engines have a low efficiency limit. Fuel cells are much more efficient and their efficiency growth is much more rapid that internal combustion engine efficiency growth.
Hydrogen powered cars will not have combustion engines. There is no 'burning' process but rather they will run via fuel cells which run on hydrogen.
Looking around in our day to day lives, it would be easier to enumerate the stuff around us that doesn't have hydrogen than the stuff that does. It's a very common element and widely available. I think the entire point of President Bush's naming all his hydrogen initiatives 'Freedom' is that we're no longer going to be dependent on any one source for any of our energy. This is inherently empowering and increases our freedom. Remember the Freedom Car initiative? I'm guessing that this theme will continue.