If it's practical, I say go for it. I Wonder about solar cells on roofs though in northern states, or states that aren't basking in desert sun. How do you tell the boss you can't drive in because your solar cells are covered in snow? 8)
But, sure, the costs would be minimal. I mean... 45K for the Rav4 and the solar system? I'd do that in a heartbeat.
It's not too bad, there a few places in the north that use wind and solar to run their businesses. Supplement the solar with a few wind turbines and it shouldn't be that big of a deal for short commutes.
Actually they've done studies and have found solar panels are more efficent as it gets cooler. There is a limit as to when that stops however i don't know the approximent temperature. The biggest downside to northern climes is the more cloudy days however offsetting it with a wind turbine helps. And they've come out with wind turbines that take up a smaller footprint, so they are more practical for suburban areas.
Not that I can afford anything like this any time soon, but it would be nice. My big question, though, is how far the electric vehicles can go on a "tank" of coulombs -- I'd like to be able to go 375-500 miles (which is how far I can go in my current car), and even further would be a nice bonus.
a 350 mile range in an electric car is tough to achieve with current battery technology, also, refills/recharges are not going to be as quick as one would get with a gasoline engine. Electric cars make great commuter cars. If you're planning on going for a big drive.... internal combustion is still the option.
Now, if you're just talking terms of cost or, I fill up and can go this far on one tank of gas.. that's a somewhat meaningless comparison, as if you're talking about commutes, you just plug in when you get home, and you're ready to go again.. there's no real comparison in terms of, "I spent X dollars for Y Gallons of gas, to go Z miles, so how many miles do I get if I buy X dollars of electricity?" because the power dynamic is so different.
For commutes, as you said, just plug it in when you get home, no big deal. I'm not really asking a question of relative cost either. But I'm anticipating going on long trips (more than 300 miles one way) at least 4 times a year, and medium-long trips (150-300 miles one way) about once a month, and I do *NOT* want my travel time to be greatly extended by having to stop and recharge.
What ztrooper said--basically, if you need to go that far in a day, stick with the current car. If it's distributed over something like 1-2 weeks of 30-40 miles a day, then the electric car makes sense.
Personally I think electric cars are a pretty cool idea.
I also think that we should invest in other fuel sources for cars and our day to day lives. Look at Brazil for example. They use sugar cane to create a bio-fuel that works far better than the ethanol that some people are pushing. Hydrogen powered cars would be a good move as well. We have the technical savy to figure these things out, it's just that the big 3 auto manufacturers are reluctant to pursue new ideas.
Coal liquification should be an avenue explored as well as a means to provide power while these other power sources are explored.
As for the day to day methods of powering our homes? Wind and solar are good alternatives, but so are new nuclear plants. Europe's been using them for years due to the high power demand. Basic common sense solutions like these would help us be good stewards of this wonderul world we were gifted with.
>>Wind and solar are good alternatives, but so are new nuclear plants.<<
And what about the tons and tons of radioactive waste a nuke plant produces? Where do we put that? Nobody wants a nuclear waste dump in their backyard, and for good reason; that stuff stays "hot" far beyond my lifetime and yours. And what about the possibility of meltdown or other malfunctions? It may be less likely with improvements in technology and safety procedures since Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, but it's still possible. Not to mention giving terrorists a whole order of magnitude bigger bang for their bomb should they decide they want to take out half a state or so of the Great Satan's people all at once.
I'm not a "no nukes" fanatic like some way-left greenies out there, but I do think these concerns are valid and must be addressed before we start investing heavily in nuclear as an alternative to oil, even with fusion plants (which are supposedly safer than the current fission-based model).
I share your concern about long term storage of nuclear waste. 10,000 years is a long time.
However, there is a new nuclear process being designed around the slightly lighter actinide Thorium. Here's an article on it: http://www.cosmosmagazine.com/node/348.
Thorium has three major advantages over Uranium -- it's not fisile, it produces much less radioactive waste and less long lived, and it can be used to safely "burn" other radioactives like plutonium.
To cut to the chase:
According to Reza Hashemi-Nezhad, a nuclear physicist at the University of Sydney who has been studying the thorium fuel cycle, the most important point is that they both can absorb neutrons and transmute into fissile elements. "From the neutron-absorption point of view, U-238 is very similar to Th-232", he said.
It's these similarities that make thorium a potential alternative fuel for nuclear reactors. But it's the unique differences between thorium and uranium that make it a potentially superior fuel. First of all, unlike U-235 and Pu-239, thorium is not fissile, so no matter how much thorium you pack together, it will not start splitting atoms and blow up. This is because it cannot undergo nuclear fission by itself and it cannot sustain a nuclear chain reaction once one starts. It's a wannabe atom splitter incapable of taking the grand title.
What makes thorium suitable as a nuclear fuel is that it is fertile, much like U-238.
Natural thorium (Th-232) absorbs a neutron and quickly transmutes into unstable Th-233 and then into protactinium Pa-233, before quickly decaying into U-233, says Hashemi- Nezhad. The beauty of this complicated process is that the U-233 that's produced at the end of this breeding process is similar to U-235 and is fissile, making it suitable as a nuclear fuel. In this way, it talks like uranium and walks like uranium, but it ain't your common-or-garden variety uranium.
And this is where it gets interesting: thorium has a very different fuel cycle to uranium. The most significant benefit of thorium's journey comes from the fact that it is a lighter element than uranium. While it's fertile, it doesn't produce as many heavy and as many highly radioactive by-products. The absence of U-238 in the process also means that no plutonium is bred in the reactor.
As a result, the waste produced from burning thorium in a reactor is dramatically less radioactive than conventional nuclear waste. Where a uranium-fuelled reactor like many of those operating today might generate a tonne of high-level waste that stays toxic for tens of thousands of years, a reactor fuelled only by thorium will generate a fraction of this amount. And it would stay radioactive for only 500 years - after which it would be as manageable as coal ash.
So not only would there be less waste, the waste generated would need to be locked up for only five per cent of the time compared to most nuclear waste. Not surprisingly, the technical challenges in storing a smaller amount for 500 years are much lower than engineering something to be solid, secure and discreet for 10,000 years.
But wait, there's more: thorium has another remarkable property. Add plutonium to the mix - or any other radioactive actinide - and the thorium fuel process will actually incinerate these elements. That's right: it will chew up old nuclear waste as part of the power-generation process. It could not only generate power, but also act as a waste disposal plant for some of humanity's most heinous toxic waste.
I would rather have a nuclear waste dump in my backyard than either a coal-fired power plant or a mountaintop removal coal mine. But I'd much rather have a wind farm or a field of switch grass than any of 'em.
Fusion power, by the way, has been 20 years away for the last 40 years at least. Building more of any technology we don't trust "just to tide us over until fusion plants come online" is not the wise way to bet.
And what about the tons and tons of radioactive waste a nuke plant produces? Where do we put that? Nobody wants a nuclear waste dump in their backyard, and for good reason; that stuff stays "hot" far beyond my lifetime and yours.
Yucca Mountain (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucca_Mountain). Pretty much the perfect place to store it for the time periods needed, and gets it all in one carefully controlled place. Oh and the vessels used to transport it are pretty much indestructible.
And what about the possibility of meltdown or other malfunctions? It may be less likely with improvements in technology and safety procedures since Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, but it's still possible.
Chernobyl was a shitty reactor design and shoddily built. It can not be usefully compared to any reactors of its time in the USA, let alone modern ones. The average radiation dose received by people around Three Mile Island was eight millirems (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Mile_Island_accident#Health_effects_and_epidemiology) about equal to a chest x-ray. And the highest dose was 100 millirems, about a third of the average background level of radiation received by US residents in a year. Not one death has been linked to he accident. All modern reactors are built so that by their very design they are self-sealing & self-damping in the event of a meltdown.
Not to mention giving terrorists a whole order of magnitude bigger bang for their bomb should they decide they want to take out half a state or so of the Great Satan's people all at once.
If you are referencing blowing up a reactor to create a nuclear bomb, that is not physically possible. Reactors =/= bombs and the can't got critical in that way.
Nuclear power isn't perfect and without risk. But it is nowhere near the demon it is made out to be. And considering the known risks of our current power generation methods, some changes do need to be made.
Kind of tough when the Senate Majority Leader is opposed, but that's not permanent. Yucca is still a better choice than Hanford. (They've got their own problems....)
If you are referencing blowing up a reactor to create a nuclear bomb, that is not physically possible. Reactors =/= bombs and the can't got critical in that way.
I read that as blowing up the containment vessel & core of a power reactor and releasing the full inventory into the environment. Figure that "half a state or so" is extreme poetic license, though--it'd probably look a lot like Chernobyl on a smaller scale. (Why smaller scale? In the absence of a core fire, the debris plume won't loft as high, and thus won't travel as far. Besides, in its standard operating mode a US power reactor doesn't contain anywhere near as much Xe-135.)
I agree that concerns regarding nuclear power need to be adressed before we do anything. I just think that it is a viable solution to the fuel problems we face.
Lifting the barriers on brazilian sugar and sugar ethanol would go a long way towards helping as well.
Research into other fuel possibilities would be nice as well. Maybe a way to use methane, as one farmer is to produce power for his milk farm. There are thousands of possible powersources we can investigate we just have to have the courage and imagination to explore them.
That wonderful Brazilian biofuel is ethanol, exactly the same chemical as what we make from corn. The difference is that it's a lot more efficient (in terms of how much fuel you get for the effort and crop inputs) to make it from cane sugar than from corn. One of the smarter things the US could do for its own energy policy would be to remove the barriers that keep us from importing either sugar cane or ethanol from sugar cane, which have been in place for much longer than the current biofuel craze because a very small number of sugar growers have a simply absurd amount of lobbying power in Washington.
The sugar tarriffs are also the reason all our junk food is made with high fructose corn syrup rather than sugar. The world market price of sugar is cheaper than HFCS, but the artificial domestic price of sugar makes it cheaper for the food corps to use sugar. And there's evidence that that, alone, is responsible for a big chunk of the obesity epidemic in America. HFCS makes you fat: your body doesn't recognize it as calories when it's deciding whether you're still hungry.
Coal liquefacation is fine if your goal is to stop buying oil from countries that want to kill us. It's no help at all if you're trying to avoid putting fossil carbon into the atmosphere.
Batteries wear out and need to be replaced. (roughly 2-10 years depending on type & use) Solar cells wear out and need to be replaced. (roughly 20-30 years) Electric motors wear out and need to be replaced/rebuild. (varies wildly) The rest of the car is going to wear out just like a normal car would (in some cases faster, EV versions of cars are often heavier than their fossil fueled versions).
Electric cars and solar panels are damn cool. I'm really glad they are getting more press and acceptance. And if you have the right lifestyle you can come out ahead. But calling them "forever cars" is a misnomer, and is giving a false impression of them.
Tom used the word "forever". The referenced page does not. I assumed that Tom was not intending the word to be taken literally (even if it were clear what "forever" means in this context, which it's not).
I'd guess that electric engines, in the long run, tend to last longer due to being less mechanically complicated. Anyone have any hard data on this?
It sure would be nice to have $45K to spend on solar panels and an electric car. If I did, we'd get the solar panels for sure; I'm not so sure the car would be right for the lifestyle of a con vendor, though.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
branchandroot
(no subject)
Date: 2008-05-14 08:03 pm (UTC)But, sure, the costs would be minimal. I mean... 45K for the Rav4 and the solar system? I'd do that in a heartbeat.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-05-14 08:17 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-05-15 01:52 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-05-14 08:15 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-05-14 08:43 pm (UTC)Now, if you're just talking terms of cost or, I fill up and can go this far on one tank of gas.. that's a somewhat meaningless comparison, as if you're talking about commutes, you just plug in when you get home, and you're ready to go again.. there's no real comparison in terms of, "I spent X dollars for Y Gallons of gas, to go Z miles, so how many miles do I get if I buy X dollars of electricity?" because the power dynamic is so different.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-05-14 09:10 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-05-14 09:22 pm (UTC)What
(no subject)
Date: 2008-05-16 06:09 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-05-14 09:12 pm (UTC)I also think that we should invest in other fuel sources for cars and our day to day lives. Look at Brazil for example. They use sugar cane to create a bio-fuel that works far better than the ethanol that some people are pushing. Hydrogen powered cars would be a good move as well. We have the technical savy to figure these things out, it's just that the big 3 auto manufacturers are reluctant to pursue new ideas.
Coal liquification should be an avenue explored as well as a means to provide power while these other power sources are explored.
As for the day to day methods of powering our homes? Wind and solar are good alternatives, but so are new nuclear plants. Europe's been using them for years due to the high power demand. Basic common sense solutions like these would help us be good stewards of this wonderul world we were gifted with.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-05-14 09:18 pm (UTC)And what about the tons and tons of radioactive waste a nuke plant produces? Where do we put that? Nobody wants a nuclear waste dump in their backyard, and for good reason; that stuff stays "hot" far beyond my lifetime and yours. And what about the possibility of meltdown or other malfunctions? It may be less likely with improvements in technology and safety procedures since Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, but it's still possible. Not to mention giving terrorists a whole order of magnitude bigger bang for their bomb should they decide they want to take out half a state or so of the Great Satan's people all at once.
I'm not a "no nukes" fanatic like some way-left greenies out there, but I do think these concerns are valid and must be addressed before we start investing heavily in nuclear as an alternative to oil, even with fusion plants (which are supposedly safer than the current fission-based model).
(no subject)
Date: 2008-05-14 09:43 pm (UTC)However, there is a new nuclear process being designed around the slightly lighter actinide Thorium. Here's an article on it: http://www.cosmosmagazine.com/node/348.
Thorium has three major advantages over Uranium -- it's not fisile, it produces much less radioactive waste and less long lived, and it can be used to safely "burn" other radioactives like plutonium.
To cut to the chase:
According to Reza Hashemi-Nezhad, a nuclear physicist at the University of Sydney who has been studying the thorium fuel cycle, the most important point is that they both can absorb neutrons and transmute into fissile elements. "From the neutron-absorption point of view, U-238 is very similar to Th-232", he said.
It's these similarities that make thorium a potential alternative fuel for nuclear reactors. But it's the unique differences between thorium and uranium that make it a potentially superior fuel. First of all, unlike U-235 and Pu-239, thorium is not fissile, so no matter how much thorium you pack together, it will not start splitting atoms and blow up. This is because it cannot undergo nuclear fission by itself and it cannot sustain a nuclear chain reaction once one starts. It's a wannabe atom splitter incapable of taking the grand title.
What makes thorium suitable as a nuclear fuel is that it is fertile, much like U-238.
Natural thorium (Th-232) absorbs a neutron and quickly transmutes into unstable Th-233 and then into protactinium Pa-233, before quickly decaying into U-233, says Hashemi- Nezhad. The beauty of this complicated process is that the U-233 that's produced at the end of this breeding process is similar to U-235 and is fissile, making it suitable as a nuclear fuel. In this way, it talks like uranium and walks like uranium, but it ain't your common-or-garden variety uranium.
And this is where it gets interesting: thorium has a very different fuel cycle to uranium. The most significant benefit of thorium's journey comes from the fact that it is a lighter element than uranium. While it's fertile, it doesn't produce as many heavy and as many highly radioactive by-products. The absence of U-238 in the process also means that no plutonium is bred in the reactor.
As a result, the waste produced from burning thorium in a reactor is dramatically less radioactive than conventional nuclear waste. Where a uranium-fuelled reactor like many of those operating today might generate a tonne of high-level waste that stays toxic for tens of thousands of years, a reactor fuelled only by thorium will generate a fraction of this amount. And it would stay radioactive for only 500 years - after which it would be as manageable as coal ash.
So not only would there be less waste, the waste generated would need to be locked up for only five per cent of the time compared to most nuclear waste. Not surprisingly, the technical challenges in storing a smaller amount for 500 years are much lower than engineering something to be solid, secure and discreet for 10,000 years.
But wait, there's more: thorium has another remarkable property. Add plutonium to the mix - or any other radioactive actinide - and the thorium fuel process will actually incinerate these elements. That's right: it will chew up old nuclear waste as part of the power-generation process. It could not only generate power, but also act as a waste disposal plant for some of humanity's most heinous toxic waste.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-05-14 10:07 pm (UTC)Fusion power, by the way, has been 20 years away for the last 40 years at least. Building more of any technology we don't trust "just to tide us over until fusion plants come online" is not the wise way to bet.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-05-14 10:12 pm (UTC)Yucca Mountain (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucca_Mountain). Pretty much the perfect place to store it for the time periods needed, and gets it all in one carefully controlled place. Oh and the vessels used to transport it are pretty much indestructible.
And what about the possibility of meltdown or other malfunctions? It may be less likely with improvements in technology and safety procedures since Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, but it's still possible.
Chernobyl was a shitty reactor design and shoddily built. It can not be usefully compared to any reactors of its time in the USA, let alone modern ones.
The average radiation dose received by people around Three Mile Island was eight millirems (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Mile_Island_accident#Health_effects_and_epidemiology) about equal to a chest x-ray. And the highest dose was 100 millirems, about a third of the average background level of radiation received by US residents in a year. Not one death has been linked to he accident.
All modern reactors are built so that by their very design they are self-sealing & self-damping in the event of a meltdown.
Not to mention giving terrorists a whole order of magnitude bigger bang for their bomb should they decide they want to take out half a state or so of the Great Satan's people all at once.
If you are referencing blowing up a reactor to create a nuclear bomb, that is not physically possible. Reactors =/= bombs and the can't got critical in that way.
Nuclear power isn't perfect and without risk. But it is nowhere near the demon it is made out to be. And considering the known risks of our current power generation methods, some changes do need to be made.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-05-14 10:37 pm (UTC)Kind of tough when the Senate Majority Leader is opposed, but that's not permanent. Yucca is still a better choice than Hanford. (They've got their own problems....)
If you are referencing blowing up a reactor to create a nuclear bomb, that is not physically possible. Reactors =/= bombs and the can't got critical in that way.
I read that as blowing up the containment vessel & core of a power reactor and releasing the full inventory into the environment. Figure that "half a state or so" is extreme poetic license, though--it'd probably look a lot like Chernobyl on a smaller scale. (Why smaller scale? In the absence of a core fire, the debris plume won't loft as high, and thus won't travel as far. Besides, in its standard operating mode a US power reactor doesn't contain anywhere near as much Xe-135.)
(no subject)
Date: 2008-05-15 01:02 am (UTC)Lifting the barriers on brazilian sugar and sugar ethanol would go a long way towards helping as well.
Research into other fuel possibilities would be nice as well. Maybe a way to use methane, as one farmer is to produce power for his milk farm. There are thousands of possible powersources we can investigate we just have to have the courage and imagination to explore them.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-05-14 09:57 pm (UTC)The sugar tarriffs are also the reason all our junk food is made with high fructose corn syrup rather than sugar. The world market price of sugar is cheaper than HFCS, but the artificial domestic price of sugar makes it cheaper for the food corps to use sugar. And there's evidence that that, alone, is responsible for a big chunk of the obesity epidemic in America. HFCS makes you fat: your body doesn't recognize it as calories when it's deciding whether you're still hungry.
Coal liquefacation is fine if your goal is to stop buying oil from countries that want to kill us. It's no help at all if you're trying to avoid putting fossil carbon into the atmosphere.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-05-14 10:17 pm (UTC)Batteries wear out and need to be replaced. (roughly 2-10 years depending on type & use)
Solar cells wear out and need to be replaced. (roughly 20-30 years)
Electric motors wear out and need to be replaced/rebuild. (varies wildly)
The rest of the car is going to wear out just like a normal car would (in some cases faster, EV versions of cars are often heavier than their fossil fueled versions).
Electric cars and solar panels are damn cool. I'm really glad they are getting more press and acceptance. And if you have the right lifestyle you can come out ahead. But calling them "forever cars" is a misnomer, and is giving a false impression of them.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-05-14 10:31 pm (UTC)I'd guess that electric engines, in the long run, tend to last longer due to being less mechanically complicated. Anyone have any hard data on this?
(no subject)
Date: 2008-05-15 02:20 am (UTC)