The Gaming Den

IGTN wrote:If we're independent from foreign oil over here, we won't need a huge gas-guzzling military presence in the gulf, and so we won't need much of their oil over there, either.

Dude, the U.S. has fleets and bases all over the world as part of the general hegemony. That's not stopping just because we need less oil. That only stops when we roll back the plan where we dictate terms to the rest of the world based on having a bigger stick. Good luck with that.

SphereOfFeetMan wrote: Your electric car is compared to a gasoline fueled car that gets 21.5 mpg. That is a false equivalence when you want to compare best case scenarios. The best gasoline fueled cars get 40mpg or even 50mpg.

Wha? Who said anything about best cases- why would I even want to compare best cases? I went with the average because that is closest to what is actual rather than some comparison of the best of the best, which most folks would not be driving. Most people aren't driving the best gasoline fueled cars (I don't know anyone who has a non-hybrid car that gets 40+ mpg) and I am comparing to what crap we would be getting off the road. Comparing averages is the only sensical way to make the argument.

I chose to rely on an average mpg rating for the gas car and a conservative mile/kW rating on the electric car. I rummaged around and found people counting 3-5 miles per kW as an average for electric passenger cars (I didn't bother to seek out the best of the best), and I chose to use the most conservative.

[edit]o yea, for the battery disposal dilemma- Lithium batteries don't totally die, but rather drain to about 80% effectiveness on a full charge after a while, so after several years a 200 mile range would become 160. Still, the great hope currently lies in ultracapacitors.

It's unclear to me how far along the best of them are from research to being marketable, but once we finally start caring about these kinds of things, the world will be changed significantly. This is the kind of research/backing I would be in favor of in order to spur electronic car development. There are other battery technologies in development/research as well, but supercapacitors are the way to go in the long term. They are reusable nigh indefinitely, and can put out plenty of power in a hurry.

In an absolute sense, there is efficiency in buying in bulk. Generating power in a large dedicated facility can get much better efficiency than can generating power in a portable engine. And electric cars don't use power to stay in one place while a petrol engine has to idle and use fuel while stationary.

Electricity is a better answer, and it will be the future. Thermodynamics being what it is, the power needs to push a car forward are identical no matter where the power actually comes from or in what form it takes, but electricity stored into batteries can more efficiently meet those demands than can generating power by internal combustion on-site. There's several ways in which it is the superior design in an ultimate sense and it will be the model we eventually switch to.

-Username17

How fast is the recharge rate at this point for electric cars? Because that will be another big difficulty if consumers have to wait too long to recharge as it would restrict long range travel. I mean it takes an hour to charge my cellphone.

Again I'm not saying the electric cars are bad, just illustrating potential problems

BTW Over in Vietnam electric mopeds area becoming more common, though largely with younger girls who can't afford a real motorbike yet. I'd get one But I fat enough now that I'd break it

The average gas-fueled vehicle on the road doesn't break 20mpg. The hybrid that Americans spent billions of dollars financing? It goes at 20mpg.

And no, Brazil doesn't cut trees to feed its Ethanol production. That'd be silly - the soil in the rainforest areas can't be used to produce sugar cane.

Alternatives will never become viable if there is no pressure to do so.

-Crissa

Depending upon how much voltage you have, modern batteries can be recharged quickly. However, that doesn't matter for the majority of driving. If your car can drive all day, then there's no reason for you to car if it takes two hours to recharge. We're just cheating with gasoline, it's a habit we must break. Our air is limited.

Depending upon how much voltage you have, modern batteries can be recharged quickly. However, that doesn't matter for the majority of driving. If you car can drive all day, then there's no reason for you to car if it takes two hours to recharge. We're just cheating with gasoline, it's a habit we must break. Our air is limited.

You shouldn't be driving more than 8 hours in a day anyway. That's just out-and-out dangerous, especially considering that to do more than 8 hours you'd be driving at night when you're already tired and sedentary.

I can easily see a near-future where it becomes a near-family ritual to park your car after a long day's work, activate the car's 'autocharge' mode, and then you plug your car into an outlet before going into your house for the night. The batteries charge up and then automatically cuts the power when they're full power, saving on the electric bill. When you get in your car for the next day, you unplug your car, start up the car, and let 'er rip.

I can see a new favourite sick day excuse "My stupid teenage kid forgot to plug the car back in when he borrowed it last night"

This might be worth watching for those interested in the topic

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/heat/view/

I don’t dispute that electricity is the future. I am merely pointing out that high mpg gasoline cars (and gas hybrids) are currently a responsible and valid option.

Yes, Hummers exist. The fact that they exist is in no way relevant to the discussion about which technology is more capable of carbon efficiency, and lessening overall levels of pollution. High mpg gasoline cars exist, and they are competitive with electric cars.

Clikml, you say that the numbers you gave are a conservative estimate of electric vehicles (EV). Ok, so what are your best existing numbers for EV?
-What is the carbon footprint?
-What is the cost of the vehicle?
-How long do the batteries last? What is their warranty?
-What are the pollutants for the batteries for the life of the EV?
-How well do the batteries perform in geological areas of extreme temperature?

I have not found any numbers for a good plug-in EV. Here is what I have found:

Click for the entire article:http://www.popularmechanics.com/automot ... 85557.html

Emphasis mine:

Popular Mechanics, October 2 2008 wrote:...
The bottom line: As EV range increases, cost increases. The new industry rule of thumb, according to presenters at the Toyota Sustainable Mobility Seminar here, is that batteries will cost about $500 per electric mile delivered.
...
Cost aside, battery life is a serious concern, regardless of how manufacturers choose to design and manage their li-ion batteries. The current Prius, which uses nickel-metal-hydride batteries, has a 10-year warranty on the battery pack, but Toyota's Reinert admitted that such a guarantee would be very difficult to offer on the electrified version. "If the warranty is only three years, are customers going to accept that?" he asked. Unless battery life can be improved, plug-in cars might succeed in reducing fuel cost per mile, only to transfer the burden of capital costs of imported batteries to the owner. GM has announced a goal of warranting the Volt battery pack for 10 years, or 150,000 miles.

In an earlier interview with PM, Reinert pointed out that in very cold temperatures, mountain regions in the winter, and hot zones, the American southwest in the summer, "You can lose an order of magnitude of energy availability in the battery. So if you have a 40-mile range normally, in Boulder, Colo., when it was 10 below zero, you might end up with a 4-mile range, with the heater going and all the other things."
...

Lago PARANOIA wrote: I can easily see a near-future where it becomes a near-family ritual to park your car after a long day's work, activate the car's 'autocharge' mode, and then you plug your car into an outlet before going into your house for the night. The batteries charge up and then automatically cuts the power when they're full power, saving on the electric bill. When you get in your car for the next day, you unplug your car, start up the car, and let 'er rip.

That already exists here in Canada. It's called "Plugging in your engine heater overnight, so that your engine isn't a freezing block of metal the next day."

I'd imagine that it's not a big deal, and many people in cold climates already do something very similar.

Batteries are luckily, highly recyclable. We've been able to recycle 99.99% of the parts of a lead-acid battery for decades.

Batteries are expensive. But an electric engine is much cheaper than a gasoline one to build, and has less moving parts that wear out. So the position of cost in maintenance is just shifted.

The Volt is a joke. First of all, they're advertising it - and you can't buy it yet. And it has a range of 40 miles. That's 1/10th the range of other electric/hybrid vehicles.

And yes, some battery technologies do various things: Memory - where the battery eventually does not hold a charge through how often its charged; Age - where a battery's capacity is directly reduced by the length of time from manufacture; Bleed - where a battery loses charge over time even if you don't use it... With each new battery type we have a new symptom. But most modern batteries only suffer one or two of these. Batteries twenty years ago suffered all of these. so complaining about it is moot. PS: Gasoline suffers Bleed (old gasoline is not as good as fresh); Gasoline tanks suffer Memory (stuff builds up in the tank and delivery systems to reduce range and mileage); etc, etc.

No one says not to replace high efficiency engines with electric. If you're driving to remote areas or across the country, gasoline or some fuel is better, yes. But that's not what most of the driving is. Nor most cars.

And OMG, of course you can reduce mileage by using the heater. Just because you're used to a wasteful motor that produces heat you have to dispose of doesn't mean a different engine is less efficient. I've run out of gas on the road exactly three times, and two were due to long emergency trips, and the other was due to a normal trip done under extremely cold conditions. Yes, it more than halved my mileage. Duh. (Tho of those two times I ran out of gas as I drove into a gasoline station...)

-Crissa

Buy Citgo, support communism.

[Edit]Soon enough we might be making biodiesel out of cellulose via Patagonian tree fungus.[/Edit]

I said my exact thoughts on that in the second post in the thread (which was even about what you linked to) -- but I'm replying not because of that, but because of the most interesting power generation technology out there right now and a huge step forward for "green" energy.

Surgo wrote:I said my exact thoughts on that in the second post in the thread (which was even about what you linked to) -- but I'm replying not because of that, but because of the most interesting power generation technology out there right now and a huge step forward for "green" energy.

I'll assume you're talking about the fungus rather than Citgo. My bad. At any rate, I think you're dead wrong on photosynthesis having anything to do with it. There are enough common processes producing junk cellulose as a byproduct that the initial energy input is irrelevant. For one, paper recycling is complete bullshit at the moment.

As for nuclear power--hell yes. Especially reactors like that, if they work. Anything to make atomics seem 'safe' enough that we can start using them for large-scale space exploration.

Large scale 5th generation nuclear reactors are obviously the way to go. If you beleive general electric and those french guys, you could meet all of Australia's power needs, and train a generation of nuclear engineers, and build some serious refining infrastructure for 30 billion dollars. Australian.

That is basically free - our budget surplus last year was 20 billion dollars.

You'd obviously want to build out more, say exceed targets by 50% and spend 40 billion dollars, so you can meet much greater electricity demands.

Then everyone can live in a McMansion for all I care.

That's not really the way to go. Currently, we don't have any method in mind of cleaning up after nuclear power plants. The energy production method destroys the building itself, and the materials become unusable for tens of thousands of years. They create an area of desolation and toxicity that lasts longer than human civilization has so far.

By far the best power generation system I've seen is to put magnetic cables dangling from satellites in the Clark Belt. Then use the power generated from interactions with our ionosphere to power a microwave gun to fire at stationary receptor stations in the Pacific Ocean. Use the power to split water, bottle the Hydrogen, and burn it off again in power stations around the world to run turbines and make electricity. That produces zero carbon footprint and doesn't do something dangerous and stupid like expose individual users to Hydrogen canisters.

---

BTW: biofuel is carbon neutral. Oh sure, burning sugars puts a lot of Carbon Dioxide into the air, but the Carbon in those plants all came out of the air. When you factor in the production method, the overall carbon footprint is zero. So it's a pretty good method.

As to biofuel being somehow responsible for the world food shortages we've had in the last few years - that's bullshit oil industry propaganda. The shortages were because Southeast Asia was able to grow less crops of rice these last years. That's because climate shifts have given them less planting seasons to work with in a year between heavy rains. Oh snap. When India and China put export bans on rice, the cereal markets all over the world roll over and take notice. Americans fermenting corn stalks to make Ethanol out of has no real effect on that.

-Username17

Those reactors, I suppose, do have the benefit that when you're done with them, they're already sealed and safely contained.

However, then you're basically making little minefields all over the earth to be forgotten.

American corn ethanol might not be carbon neutral, because the ethanol production may not outweigh the diesel fuel, fertilizer, and plowed under land used to produce it. New plots of modern farming destroy old plots of carbon-negative grasslands. But that's more because modern industrial farming is not carbon neutral - not because biofuels aren't carbon neutral.

-Crissa

The energy production method destroys the building itself, and the materials become unusable for tens of thousands of years. They create an area of desolation and toxicity that lasts longer than human civilization has so far.

What generation of reactor are you talking about, Frank? The tens of thousands of years (really, more like millions) activated thing only lasts for isotopes of Uranium--which is confined solely to the reactor, which is actually relatively tiny.

BUT. But but but.

Now, nuclear waste is a huge problem. While the amount of Earth rendered unusable is small, the destruction IS effectively permanent and will always be a problem. If we have another method of power generation we should use that first. But going nuclear isn't like cutting off your legs to feed your family for the rest of your life. It's more like cutting off your pinky fingers.

Lago PARANOIA wrote:

The energy production method destroys the building itself, and the materials become unusable for tens of thousands of years. They create an area of desolation and toxicity that lasts longer than human civilization has so far.

What generation of reactor are you talking about, Frank? The tens of thousands of years (really, more like millions) activated thing only lasts for isotopes of Uranium--which is confined solely to the reactor, which is actually relatively tiny.

BUT. But but but.

Now, nuclear waste is a huge problem. While the amount of Earth rendered unusable is small, the destruction IS effectively permanent and will always be a problem. If we have another method of power generation we should use that first. But going nuclear isn't like cutting off your legs to feed your family for the rest of your life. It's more like cutting off your pinky fingers.

Except when you do a bad job in the amputation process; and then get gangrene.

Because, after all, all nuclear material is perfectly safe and sound, and unable to contaminate the soil or water around it.

Honestly, I don't know all there is about current nuclear reactors; I'm no physicist nor have I read about it extensively. That said, I do know that my nation's CANDU reactor type is extremely efficient and have numerous effective fail-safes, and have never become an active danger.

According to all the various things I've heard from the government and media, one of our reactors can run an additional 6 months on fuel the US' type considers spent. Consider that this reactor type is from what, the 70s. How much more efficient and safe can we go now? Surely a lot more.


As for other things...I do seem to recall a very neat hybrid hehicle UPS or something was testing. Was a hydraulic-diesel hybrid. Was able to be added to existing vehicles and increased efficiency by SEVENTY PERCENT in stop and go traffic, the worst kind you can have. Such a system would be cheap to use, manufacture, and would at the very least cut down on fuel costs for public transit and sanitation services. They apparently started using small numbers of them around the time of the article (2005? 2003?).

I dunno folks, but it seems to me that a few of our various energy problems would be solved if people looked at what we have, and use it. Surely there are more uses for existing tech, like the above.

On a somewhat related note, if we could finally set up an orbital elevator or two, we'd be in even better shape. Less fuel needed to launch crap, the ability to launch nuclear waste into the sun, ability to reach moon, etc. It's not a 'real' solution, but it's definitely a way of disposing of such things.

Orbital elevators don't really work. There are a loooot of problems that, while not strictly unsolvable, might as well be.

Surgo wrote:Orbital elevators don't really work. There are a loooot of problems that, while not strictly unsolvable, might as well be.

Yeah, a 100 kilometer tall structure is under a lot of stress. Like, enough stress to rip molecules apart kinds of stress.

-Username17

Yeah, we don't have the materials science for orbital elevators right yet.

But uhh, there's no reason we can't send things to Mars, Moon, and start farming rocks out there.

-Crissa

The nuclear reactors as "safe cheap energy" thing is pretty much pure propaganda.

The whole industry runs of government subsidies (where-ever it happens to actually run at all). My favourite moment on that one was an interview with former prime minister John Howard, a proponent of the "give money to my corporate aristocrat mates in the nuclear/uranium industry" plan.

He had convened a special government panel with an obvious yes man running it to rubber stamp (or "re-examine") nuclear power. He was asked "Why waste the time and effort, everyone knows it is only profitable due to massive government subsidies".

So Howard blathered something about new technologies and the slight possibility that had changed justifying a panel.

So he was asked "why not options other than just nuclear, like solar power"

And he said, rather remarkably something a lot like "Why waste the time and effort, everyone knows it is only profitable due to massive government subsidies" Completely straight faced.

Anyway back to nuclear power sucking...

Also they have yet to figure out what to do with the waste. They literally have nowhere safe to store it and no safe way to dispose of it. In Australia our tiny reactors waste is all "temporarily" stored because we don't even have anywhere to put that, what the fuck are we supposed to do if we build tens or hundreds of full scale reactors?

But the real killer from what I understand is that our uranium supply is not what people imagine it to be.

We have enough uranium to run the relatively small number of reactors we have now for quite a long time. However if we actually build reactors on the scale supporters of the "safe cheap nuclear" option want we would run out on a pretty damn quick time frame. Or at least so I am led to believe.

So if you ARE obsessed with an imaginary future launching nuclear space rockets into space on ten year missions to go where no man has gone before then you sure as heck don't want it to become our staple domestic power supply because there won't be any uranium left to fuel your rocket ships.

PL is Exactly Right there. The only reasons that government guys have for going to the nuclear option are:

• It's an opportunity for graft.
• It's a good step towards making nuclear weapons, which are the ultimate penis extension.

-Username17