If there was a portable system which could rapidly transfer a charge to a battery, that did not weigh as much as that battery, we'd be using it instead of the battery. Think about what you're saying. The Tesla's battery weighs 1,000 pounds. A portable system to transfer 1/10 of the battery pack's capacity would weigh... about 1/10 of the battery. 100 pounds. That's about the same as what, a gallon and a half of gas? Which weighs maybe 10 pounds?
There's also absolutely no other use for such a beast. Can of gas? Who doesn't have a can of gas. if you have a lawn, you have a lawn mower. If you have a lawn mower, YOU HAVE A CAN OF GAS.
Ohhh, you're an urbanite, no lawn mower, no can of gas? Sounds like a personal problem to me.
They don't have to -- with every other car, if it runs out of fuel, someone grabs a gallon canister and trots over, drops in enough fuel to get it off the track, and there you have it. now, they may push it in to the warehouse regardless.. but running out of gas on the track is not a big issue for an IC car. An electric? Yes, you would need to push it.
There's a huge difference between running out of juice in an IC car and an electric. I've run out of gas before. Hell, I ran out of gas the first time in 1998 -- note the year, cell phones weren't huge. It was a 3 mile walk for me to my buddy's house, but after that -- after they all had their chuckles -- we just nabbed their car and the gas for his lawnmower, threw about a half gallon into my tank, problem solved. Had I been in an electric car, it would have needed to be towed.
It's a not-very-subtle distinction between the two that I think was well-illustrated by the scene in question. What actually happened to them is irrelevant -- they were demonstrating what actually would happen to you, and in THAT light, the whole shebang is accurate.
I think you think electric cars are far greener than reality would suggest.
never mind that you're dismissing a large portion of the population that may need to drive more than a few dozen miles in a day, or who need the car to operate at an odd schedule that would not allow for full charging (let's say someone works 8pm-4am, and then car is used to take kids to school, grocery shopping every several days -- pattern of use that simply doesn't work with an electric).
that is not something that you or I, the average Joe Schmoe, will ever do on our own. These battery packs are heavy. Think less "swap the battery in my phone" and more "swap the whole engine out in my IC car".
Now, sure, the actual removal and replacement would be easier -- more in and out, less bolts and cables all over -- but the weight? close to the same.
company just isn't going to make any money. end of story. all electric vehicles? not ready for prime-time. the tesla is a car to sit in a showroom, or to ferry yourself to a luxurious event. it's not going to translate into a production vehicle for general use -- the market is abysmally small, and made up almost entirely of people living in dense urban areas. You know, the sorts of people that aren't as likely to own a car. It's a car for people who don't need a car for 18 hours a day. If you don't need a car for 18 hours a day, you probably don't need a car.
If the battery would have gone dead after 55 miles, and they drove it 25, of course they stopped before the battery was dead -- the purpose was to demonstrate to the audience in a visceral and entertaining way what would happen when the battery went dead, which would have been after 55 miles of use. There is no need to actually drive it to those 55 miles unless you're trying to verify things, but that figure was given to them BY Tesla. Who are they to argue with the manufacturer when the manufacturer is handing them numbers like that?
Nope, you simply take their word that it's 55 miles -- especially if you drive it a bit and the battery seems to be draining charge at a rate consistent with going dead after 55 miles. So you drive a bit, but not the full 55 miles that would kill the batteries for 18 hours, and then you film as if you had driven the 55 miles and the battery really was completely drained. Yeah, you're not showing reality 1:1, but you're showing what really would happen, according TO TESLA, had they driven 55 miles on their track.
Our money overlaps with their interests. And, apparently, their interests overlap with our government.
I sure wish I could make a shit-tastic car that nobody would buy for anything other than a showroom piece and then get a few hundred mil from uncle sam.
an extremely narrow track covered in very loose dirt, and you don't think a car would have significant trouble getting to any speed and keeping it?
i think the dog winning that race is a lot more likely than you believe it to be -- i'm honestly a bit impressed he didn't lose it around one of those corners
nothing, nothing, NOTHING could ever survive if a fault line OPENS UP AND SWALLOWS IT LIKE IN THAT MOVIE 2012
fortunately that sort of thing very very very rarely happens -- but if it were, NOTHING WE COULD DO WOULD HELP. Since it's an obscenely unlikely scenario and impossible to design around, it's ignored.
that's just ridiculous.
and yes, the IFRs and many other modern reactors use p-239 -- which we have laying around, it's currently waste (or uh, refined into bombs) -- these modern reactors use it as *fuel*, and the remaining waste after that is much less radioactive and for a much shorter time period. Why aren't we doing that? Because of nuclear non-proliferation treaties we've signed. That's the only real reason we're not jumping in more with fuel reprocessing and modern reactors.
We just don't want the other world wagging their finger at us because we maybe, possibly, could produce more nuclear weapons with new plants.
Fuck the rest of the world, I don't give two shits if they think every american OWNS a nuclear warhead. If they don't think we can be responsible with our nuclear shit, they can come over here and try to do something about it. I am being sincere. This is a matter of our nation's future survival. We need energy. Why should we abandon GREAT technology that could provide hundreds of years of power, that might actually FINALLY move America to energy independence, just because some Rooskies that are going to talk shit on us anyway start a bunch of huff that GOSH,THAT PLANT, THAT COULD BE CONVERTED TO PRODUCE NUCLEAR WEAPONS!
I don't give a shit if it could be. It's not, because we're using that radioactive material as fuel. It's not like we're a new nuclear power. We are *THE* nuclear power. I think if we were going to use nukes on anyone, we would have by now (excepting uh the whole WWII thing).
That is, basically, the issue -- the US Gov't doesn't want other nations going around tsk-tsk'ing us for building new plants that could possibly be used to produce nuclear weapons, and the US citizenry doesn't want any nuclear plant within 150 miles of them, period.
Both groups are off their fucking rocker and irrational, and it's harming us all.
no, actually, all that waste we want to ship in to Yucca? new reactor designs can feed off that. that's fuel. we can use that for fuel, and in the process, reduce its radioactivity significantly -- AND the waste still left while still dangerous? while it's still not something you want to play in for thousands of years, it's much less dangerous than current waste and its dangerous half-life is waaaay shorter.
you recycle uranium and plutonium by using it as fuel. yes, you increase the rate at which it decays.. and you use that energy for uhhh energy!
why would you just reduce the radioactivity of it and leave it sit? that would take an energy injection to remove energy from the waste, when we can just TAKE energy from the waste.
but that'll never happen, because nobody wants to build nuclear reactors in this country. Even if it means we'd only need to move a fraction of the waste to Yucca we're currently planning on, even if it means we could eat our own nuclear waste and weapons for a few hundred years. Nope. NIMBY BUDDEH!
Pretty sure it was supposed to survive a tsunami -- are you aware of exactly how HUGE this earthquake and tsunami were? very, very large. strangely large. abnormally large. if you had said this was coming 3 months ago people would have called you crazy -- sure, an earthquake, tsunami, sure, but this was the biggest earthquake to ever hit japan, one of the biggest EVER RECORDED, the tsunami was also of unusual size.
I'm not saying things went great considering, but considering? things could have been much worse. the plants were hit with something that nobody ever expected, least of all 40 years ago when the plants were built.
modern designs may well have survived the quake and tsunami unscathed.
That number is probably questionable and overblown.. you know this, we all know this, a lot of that is going to be similar to second-hand-smoking deaths -- that is, allegedly connected, tangentially connected, but not definitely connected.
however i WOULD believe that 13,000 Chinese are killed *mining* coal a year -- coal mining, dangerous stuff, china? not big on safety..
that's just one, that i particularly like -- there's PLENTY of new reactor designs that include a 'kill switch'. there's a bunch of different ways of doing it, too, either with control rods that are suspended above the reactor and if power fails, fall automatically, or in the IFR in the case of loss of power the liquid sodium would naturally heat up, which sucks more neutrons out of the fuel rods (not exactly but near enough for nontechnical crap yeah..) -- basically, if things go wrong, the coolant being used actually becomes a big ol' control rod when it gets too hot and stops reactions, naturally without any human guidance. Oh, and the coolant system is designed so that during loss of power, the coolant (liquid sodium here) will continue to circulate and cool things down for quite a while (and hopefully long enough to avoid a shutdown, but failing that the coolant will get hot and the core reactions shut down).
Seriously, we've got 40 years since TMI was built -- we've got this shit figured out. You don't KNOW about it because "the public hates nookyoular!" and politicians shut it down. constantly. clinton killed the IFR, last I heard GE was shopping some drop-in reactors of a more advanced design than we had back in the '90s.. to the Chinese. Basically just a big ol' box that you drop into an existing coal power plant -- remove coal furnace, replace with nuclear furnace, leave existing steam turbines in place
sure, the plants used to make the biofuel take in carbon, and then release it when the processed product -- biofuel -- is consumed..
but there's a lot of processing and transportation to get to that point, nevermind the carbon footprint of growing the stuff -- fertilizers, pesticides, planting and harvesting. all those things output co2 -- all those things consume energy. biofuel really doesn't actually produce much energy, if at all, when you take the totality of the picture into account
business done in china is done with chinese businesses. the profits they make aren't worth as much if you take the money out of china -- you ship out products, but it's not profitable to take out any of the money flowing in to china right now.
we're supporting them because they're supporting us and blah blah blah. eventually china will be done with that game, having brought in enough money to basically run their own first-world nation. or whatever the hell is it their game is. world domination. maybe. who the hell knows, but they're doing this really all in an effort to quickly bring money and development into China -- it's all an effort by the Chinese to ramp up towards something or for something.
basically i get the feeling that in some complicated way i can't understand it's all part of an economic war being waged similar to the us/ussr cold war, but rather than the economic war being driven by military demands it's being more directly waged economically.
your entire island is the size of one single US state.
not even a big one. just a normal-sized one.
yeah. there's kinda that. you have no concept of the scale of things here in america. if you drive, non-stop, without even sleeping, it'll take you about two days to go from coast to coast. i think if you tried that in europe you'd end up in ASIA. we just end up in a place where we have to adjust our clocks and oh gosh, look the water is at the SUNSET over here hahaha!
it's easy to get everyone moving together on public transport if everyone lives right on top of each other. america is a vast, vast place with many many disparate separate pockets of high density and a somewhat uneven distribution of low density pockets and a whole slew of just-sorta-there density blanketing fairly wide areas.
sense of scale in america: i used to frequently drive down to alabama to see a bunch of people i know. it's a 13 hour drive. it was a weekend trip that i needed no planning for, and that's about how long it'd take according to google maps to go from london to cannes. people do that on a whim here in the states. EUROPE IS CUTE AND TINY.
Mhmm. But what if you are shipping something from a location that is 1.5 hours from the nearest major rail line -- add at least a half hour but i'm pulling that out of my ass to load stuff on. now go two hours down the line. now unload it. half hour. now ship it to a location 1.5 hours away.
6 hours for delivery. it'd probably take 4 hours just to drive it straight from origin to destination.
not everywhere has a rail line nearby that can quickly load cargo for a several-hour trip to another location near the rail line.
It's much more complicated than filling a tank with gas.
The batteries are heavy. Very, very, very heavy. It'd have to be a machine-assisted process, which would mean probably a setup like an oil change place.
That would be very difficult to do if you were going on a prolonged trip, for instance. Pull into a place every hundred miles? 150? Take 10 minutes to change a battery every 2 hours?
I'm not saying it's not a solution, but it's very clear that it's not a viable solution to the problems with IC engines at the present time.
Slashdot Mirror
... portable, really?
Still hundreds of pounds.
If there was a portable system which could rapidly transfer a charge to a battery, that did not weigh as much as that battery, we'd be using it instead of the battery. Think about what you're saying. The Tesla's battery weighs 1,000 pounds. A portable system to transfer 1/10 of the battery pack's capacity would weigh... about 1/10 of the battery. 100 pounds. That's about the same as what, a gallon and a half of gas? Which weighs maybe 10 pounds?
There's also absolutely no other use for such a beast. Can of gas? Who doesn't have a can of gas. if you have a lawn, you have a lawn mower. If you have a lawn mower, YOU HAVE A CAN OF GAS.
Ohhh, you're an urbanite, no lawn mower, no can of gas? Sounds like a personal problem to me.
They don't have to -- with every other car, if it runs out of fuel, someone grabs a gallon canister and trots over, drops in enough fuel to get it off the track, and there you have it.
now, they may push it in to the warehouse regardless.. but running out of gas on the track is not a big issue for an IC car. An electric? Yes, you would need to push it.
There's a huge difference between running out of juice in an IC car and an electric. I've run out of gas before. Hell, I ran out of gas the first time in 1998 -- note the year, cell phones weren't huge. It was a 3 mile walk for me to my buddy's house, but after that -- after they all had their chuckles -- we just nabbed their car and the gas for his lawnmower, threw about a half gallon into my tank, problem solved. Had I been in an electric car, it would have needed to be towed.
It's a not-very-subtle distinction between the two that I think was well-illustrated by the scene in question. What actually happened to them is irrelevant -- they were demonstrating what actually would happen to you, and in THAT light, the whole shebang is accurate.
I think you think electric cars are far greener than reality would suggest.
never mind that you're dismissing a large portion of the population that may need to drive more than a few dozen miles in a day, or who need the car to operate at an odd schedule that would not allow for full charging (let's say someone works 8pm-4am, and then car is used to take kids to school, grocery shopping every several days -- pattern of use that simply doesn't work with an electric).
that is not something that you or I, the average Joe Schmoe, will ever do on our own. These battery packs are heavy. Think less "swap the battery in my phone" and more "swap the whole engine out in my IC car".
Now, sure, the actual removal and replacement would be easier -- more in and out, less bolts and cables all over -- but the weight? close to the same.
55 miles wasn't TG's number -- RTFA ;)
Tesla gave TG that range for their track, so it's not much of a jump to presume the maker of the car is correct
we did bail out tesla, and that was a mistake
company just isn't going to make any money. end of story. all electric vehicles? not ready for prime-time. the tesla is a car to sit in a showroom, or to ferry yourself to a luxurious event. it's not going to translate into a production vehicle for general use -- the market is abysmally small, and made up almost entirely of people living in dense urban areas. You know, the sorts of people that aren't as likely to own a car. It's a car for people who don't need a car for 18 hours a day. If you don't need a car for 18 hours a day, you probably don't need a car.
If the battery would have gone dead after 55 miles, and they drove it 25, of course they stopped before the battery was dead -- the purpose was to demonstrate to the audience in a visceral and entertaining way what would happen when the battery went dead, which would have been after 55 miles of use. There is no need to actually drive it to those 55 miles unless you're trying to verify things, but that figure was given to them BY Tesla. Who are they to argue with the manufacturer when the manufacturer is handing them numbers like that?
Nope, you simply take their word that it's 55 miles -- especially if you drive it a bit and the battery seems to be draining charge at a rate consistent with going dead after 55 miles. So you drive a bit, but not the full 55 miles that would kill the batteries for 18 hours, and then you film as if you had driven the 55 miles and the battery really was completely drained. Yeah, you're not showing reality 1:1, but you're showing what really would happen, according TO TESLA, had they driven 55 miles on their track.
How is that deceptive?
Oh, it was an incredibly silly stunt, no doubt about it.
I mean, these guys have played soccer with cars. more than once.
i do think the dog won fair and square, though :D
Nah, you're just not thinking recursively enough -- the 10% that isn't crap is still 90% crap.
Untrue!
Our money overlaps with their interests. And, apparently, their interests overlap with our government.
I sure wish I could make a shit-tastic car that nobody would buy for anything other than a showroom piece and then get a few hundred mil from uncle sam.
an extremely narrow track covered in very loose dirt, and you don't think a car would have significant trouble getting to any speed and keeping it?
i think the dog winning that race is a lot more likely than you believe it to be -- i'm honestly a bit impressed he didn't lose it around one of those corners
woah woah woah.
look.
nothing, nothing, NOTHING could ever survive if a fault line OPENS UP AND SWALLOWS IT LIKE IN THAT MOVIE 2012
fortunately that sort of thing very very very rarely happens -- but if it were, NOTHING WE COULD DO WOULD HELP. Since it's an obscenely unlikely scenario and impossible to design around, it's ignored.
that's just ridiculous.
and yes, the IFRs and many other modern reactors use p-239 -- which we have laying around, it's currently waste (or uh, refined into bombs) -- these modern reactors use it as *fuel*, and the remaining waste after that is much less radioactive and for a much shorter time period. Why aren't we doing that? Because of nuclear non-proliferation treaties we've signed. That's the only real reason we're not jumping in more with fuel reprocessing and modern reactors.
We just don't want the other world wagging their finger at us because we maybe, possibly, could produce more nuclear weapons with new plants.
Fuck the rest of the world, I don't give two shits if they think every american OWNS a nuclear warhead. If they don't think we can be responsible with our nuclear shit, they can come over here and try to do something about it. I am being sincere. This is a matter of our nation's future survival. We need energy. Why should we abandon GREAT technology that could provide hundreds of years of power, that might actually FINALLY move America to energy independence, just because some Rooskies that are going to talk shit on us anyway start a bunch of huff that GOSH,THAT PLANT, THAT COULD BE CONVERTED TO PRODUCE NUCLEAR WEAPONS!
I don't give a shit if it could be. It's not, because we're using that radioactive material as fuel. It's not like we're a new nuclear power. We are *THE* nuclear power. I think if we were going to use nukes on anyone, we would have by now (excepting uh the whole WWII thing).
That is, basically, the issue -- the US Gov't doesn't want other nations going around tsk-tsk'ing us for building new plants that could possibly be used to produce nuclear weapons, and the US citizenry doesn't want any nuclear plant within 150 miles of them, period.
Both groups are off their fucking rocker and irrational, and it's harming us all.
no, actually, all that waste we want to ship in to Yucca? new reactor designs can feed off that. that's fuel. we can use that for fuel, and in the process, reduce its radioactivity significantly -- AND the waste still left while still dangerous? while it's still not something you want to play in for thousands of years, it's much less dangerous than current waste and its dangerous half-life is waaaay shorter.
you recycle uranium and plutonium by using it as fuel. yes, you increase the rate at which it decays.. and you use that energy for uhhh energy!
why would you just reduce the radioactivity of it and leave it sit? that would take an energy injection to remove energy from the waste, when we can just TAKE energy from the waste.
but that'll never happen, because nobody wants to build nuclear reactors in this country. Even if it means we'd only need to move a fraction of the waste to Yucca we're currently planning on, even if it means we could eat our own nuclear waste and weapons for a few hundred years. Nope. NIMBY BUDDEH!
Pretty sure it was supposed to survive a tsunami -- are you aware of exactly how HUGE this earthquake and tsunami were? very, very large. strangely large. abnormally large. if you had said this was coming 3 months ago people would have called you crazy -- sure, an earthquake, tsunami, sure, but this was the biggest earthquake to ever hit japan, one of the biggest EVER RECORDED, the tsunami was also of unusual size.
I'm not saying things went great considering, but considering? things could have been much worse. the plants were hit with something that nobody ever expected, least of all 40 years ago when the plants were built.
modern designs may well have survived the quake and tsunami unscathed.
zing.
That number is probably questionable and overblown.. you know this, we all know this, a lot of that is going to be similar to second-hand-smoking deaths -- that is, allegedly connected, tangentially connected, but not definitely connected.
however i WOULD believe that 13,000 Chinese are killed *mining* coal a year -- coal mining, dangerous stuff, china? not big on safety..
Going by that logic nobody should be using cars, because 40 years ago somebody made some car of questionable safety.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integral_Fast_Reactor
that's just one, that i particularly like -- there's PLENTY of new reactor designs that include a 'kill switch'. there's a bunch of different ways of doing it, too, either with control rods that are suspended above the reactor and if power fails, fall automatically, or in the IFR in the case of loss of power the liquid sodium would naturally heat up, which sucks more neutrons out of the fuel rods (not exactly but near enough for nontechnical crap yeah..) -- basically, if things go wrong, the coolant being used actually becomes a big ol' control rod when it gets too hot and stops reactions, naturally without any human guidance. Oh, and the coolant system is designed so that during loss of power, the coolant (liquid sodium here) will continue to circulate and cool things down for quite a while (and hopefully long enough to avoid a shutdown, but failing that the coolant will get hot and the core reactions shut down).
Seriously, we've got 40 years since TMI was built -- we've got this shit figured out. You don't KNOW about it because "the public hates nookyoular!" and politicians shut it down. constantly. clinton killed the IFR, last I heard GE was shopping some drop-in reactors of a more advanced design than we had back in the '90s.. to the Chinese. Basically just a big ol' box that you drop into an existing coal power plant -- remove coal furnace, replace with nuclear furnace, leave existing steam turbines in place
WEEEEEEEEEELLLLLLLL not exactly
sure, the plants used to make the biofuel take in carbon, and then release it when the processed product -- biofuel -- is consumed..
but there's a lot of processing and transportation to get to that point, nevermind the carbon footprint of growing the stuff -- fertilizers, pesticides, planting and harvesting. all those things output co2 -- all those things consume energy. biofuel really doesn't actually produce much energy, if at all, when you take the totality of the picture into account
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integral_Fast_Reactor
there you go
thanks mr clinton!
Thank Clinton for canceling the US's advanced reactor research programs back in the mid 90s -- all part of his "trying to appease everybody" platform.
business done in china is done with chinese businesses. the profits they make aren't worth as much if you take the money out of china -- you ship out products, but it's not profitable to take out any of the money flowing in to china right now.
we're supporting them because they're supporting us and blah blah blah. eventually china will be done with that game, having brought in enough money to basically run their own first-world nation. or whatever the hell is it their game is. world domination. maybe. who the hell knows, but they're doing this really all in an effort to quickly bring money and development into China -- it's all an effort by the Chinese to ramp up towards something or for something.
basically i get the feeling that in some complicated way i can't understand it's all part of an economic war being waged similar to the us/ussr cold war, but rather than the economic war being driven by military demands it's being more directly waged economically.
your entire island is the size of one single US state.
not even a big one. just a normal-sized one.
yeah. there's kinda that. you have no concept of the scale of things here in america. if you drive, non-stop, without even sleeping, it'll take you about two days to go from coast to coast. i think if you tried that in europe you'd end up in ASIA. we just end up in a place where we have to adjust our clocks and oh gosh, look the water is at the SUNSET over here hahaha!
it's easy to get everyone moving together on public transport if everyone lives right on top of each other. america is a vast, vast place with many many disparate separate pockets of high density and a somewhat uneven distribution of low density pockets and a whole slew of just-sorta-there density blanketing fairly wide areas.
sense of scale in america: i used to frequently drive down to alabama to see a bunch of people i know. it's a 13 hour drive. it was a weekend trip that i needed no planning for, and that's about how long it'd take according to google maps to go from london to cannes. people do that on a whim here in the states. EUROPE IS CUTE AND TINY.
Mhmm. But what if you are shipping something from a location that is 1.5 hours from the nearest major rail line -- add at least a half hour but i'm pulling that out of my ass to load stuff on. now go two hours down the line. now unload it. half hour. now ship it to a location 1.5 hours away.
6 hours for delivery. it'd probably take 4 hours just to drive it straight from origin to destination.
not everywhere has a rail line nearby that can quickly load cargo for a several-hour trip to another location near the rail line.
It's much more complicated than filling a tank with gas.
The batteries are heavy. Very, very, very heavy. It'd have to be a machine-assisted process, which would mean probably a setup like an oil change place.
That would be very difficult to do if you were going on a prolonged trip, for instance. Pull into a place every hundred miles? 150? Take 10 minutes to change a battery every 2 hours?
I'm not saying it's not a solution, but it's very clear that it's not a viable solution to the problems with IC engines at the present time.