Burning coal to power electric cars and...

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#22
Ha ha :clown: That was a great act.


Electric motors and regenerative braking make for very efficient transportation when compared to internal combustion engine, which has been around for over 120 years. Surly we could come up with something a bit better.....oh wait, we have.😀 Let's just assume for a moment that electric power was 1/100th of the cost it is now. I don't think people would have to eat gruel just to afford the electric bill to charge their vehicle. Obviously, solar energy is the best way to go, but the technology and popularity is not quite there yet. What better way to generate the power during the transition to a majority solar power source then nuclear energy. It's not exactly new technology either, just more reliable now days. Once the old school tech internal combustion engine is phased out, people will be amazed at how much less energy we actually use for transportation. Think of the wasted gasoline you burn sitting there on a cold morning just to get the engine warm. Internal combustion engines must be warm when running or they will destroy themselves. All that motor oil lubrication......coolants.......well I guess it does add up to big business🙄



:2c:
 
#23
Mini nuclear plants to power 20,000 homes
£13m shed-size reactors will be delivered by lorry
John Vidal and Nick Rosen
guardian.co.uk, Sunday November 9 2008 00.01 GMT
The Observer, Sunday November 9 2008

Nuclear power plants smaller than a garden shed and able to power 20,000 homes will be on sale within five years, say scientists at Los Alamos, the US government laboratory which developed the first atomic bomb.

The miniature reactors will be factory-sealed, contain no weapons-grade material, have no moving parts and will be nearly impossible to steal because they will be encased in concrete and buried underground.

The US government has licensed the technology to Hyperion, a New Mexico-based company which said last week that it has taken its first firm orders and plans to start mass production within five years. 'Our goal is to generate electricity for 10 cents a watt anywhere in the world,' said John Deal, chief executive of Hyperion. 'They will cost approximately $25m [£13m] each. For a community with 10,000 households, that is a very affordable $250 per home.'

Deal claims to have more than 100 firm orders, largely from the oil and electricity industries, but says the company is also targeting developing countries and isolated communities. 'It's leapfrog technology,' he said.

The company plans to set up three factories to produce 4,000 plants between 2013 and 2023. 'We already have a pipeline for 100 reactors, and we are taking our time to tool up to mass-produce this reactor.'

The first confirmed order came from TES, a Czech infrastructure company specialising in water plants and power plants. 'They ordered six units and optioned a further 12. We are very sure of their capability to purchase,' said Deal. The first one, he said, would be installed in Romania. 'We now have a six-year waiting list. We are in talks with developers in the Cayman Islands, Panama and the Bahamas.'

The reactors, only a few metres in diameter, will be delivered on the back of a lorry to be buried underground. They must be refuelled every 7 to 10 years. Because the reactor is based on a 50-year-old design that has proved safe for students to use, few countries are expected to object to plants on their territory. An application to build the plants will be submitted to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission next year.

'You could never have a Chernobyl-type event - there are no moving parts,' said Deal. 'You would need nation-state resources in order to enrich our uranium. Temperature-wise it's too hot to handle. It would be like stealing a barbecue with your bare hands.'

Other companies are known to be designing micro-reactors. Toshiba has been testing 200KW reactors measuring roughly six metres by two metres. Designed to fuel smaller numbers of homes for longer, they could power a single building for up to 40 years.
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http://www.hyperionpowergeneration.com/

An externally hosted image should be here but it was not working when we last tested it.


dave
 
#24
Really cool. I don't understand why nuclear is not the new energy priority, it has potential vastly superior to any other forms of alternate energy at this time. BUT it won't happen here in the US, the new administration has been lobbied to death against the idea of nuclear power. Ironically also against burning more coal, that resource of which we happen to have a lot of. I suppose it will be up to the oil industry and OPEC to supply our energy needs in the future. Maybe we could start selling America to pay for it all......wait......no......too late....the auction has already begun. Looks like it is going to continue.😡 Be sure to get your bids in early.😀 Maybe you guys in Canada can invest in this new techology and sell us the power. At least then all those US assets won't be sent to the other side of the globe.:headshot:


Back to the original question, as for battery power electric cars, what would be done with the toxic chemicals from the spent and worn out batteries? Hmmmm Problem.........can't just flush it down the Crapper.


:smash: :smash: :smash: :smash:
 
#27
CO2: The Greatest Scientific Scandal Of Our Time by Zbigniew Jaworowski
http://www.21stcenturysciencetech.com/Articles 2007/20_1-2_CO2_Scandal.pdf

Read the part on page 16 that says:

We may get to the point where the only way of saving the world will be for industrial civilization to collapse. Strong elaborated on the idea of sustainable development, which, he said, can be implemented by deliberate quest of poverty . . . reduced resource consumption . . . and set levels of mortality control.
 
#28
Eva said:
The engines in conventional cars tend to get only 10% to 30% fuel energy efficiencies and they go happily spreading the toxic waste from combustion everywhere in the world. 80% of the energy in the fuel is typically wasted as heat, noise and incomplete combustion.
Click to expand...

Car engines are Typically 23-25%, AFAIK.

Eva said:
[BI couldn't regard doubling or triplying the energy efficiency as disadvantageous either.[/B]
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Tripling? 75-odd%? Nope. Any heat-engine based power station is only around 1/3 efficient. Ok, so the grid is 90 or 95% efficient, but the power stations are not.

Even the latest design of Nuclear power station is only 1/3 efficient - the thermal rating of the reactor is 3x the electrical rating of the entire station.

Also, if all of the world's energy came from nuclear power, we would exhaust our 'known' supplies of uranium in about 3 years. And most of that is in 3 countries, IIRC - Canada, Australia and Russia.

Mining Uranium is pretty nasty as well.

The best solution to the energy problem is, IMHO, solar energy. We only need to collect 10% of the solar energy falling on a peice of land half the size of Texas. With Thermal solar technology, the heat can be stored for use later on - during the night, for example.

Before the 1st World War there was a solar power station in the Sahara that did just that - 24hr, cheap, reliable electricity.

James
 
#29
Car engines are only 23-25% efficient when operating continuously at optimum RPM and torque, which is something that can only happen during long road trips. For city driving consider maybe 1-5% (starting and braking again and again something that weights over 1000Kg with no recycling of kinetic energy).

Electric motors don't suffer from that problem, they are always close to 90%. They allow for regenerative braking too, electric motors can act as brakes and restore energy to the batteries. This approach has been used in electric trains for a very long time.

Even running internal combustion engines in optimum conditions and charging batteries with them to power electrical cars later would result in energy savings, at least for driving in cities. Modern hybrid cars do that.
 
#31
Three years? Most calculations I've seen say about 80 years, assuming we use only the uranium (doesn't count thorium) we already have found and use it in light water reactors without reprocessing. But the time one gets when calculating like this is far lower than what's reasonable due to the way mineral prospecting works.

New high-temperature reactors can achive up to 50% efficiency as the temperature is upped to 500-900 degrees C by using gas, molten metal or salt for cooling, but thermal efficency is not the important part where improvements can be made.

If breeder reactors are used uranium and/or thorium resources will last thousands of years.

What's more important than the thermodynamic efficiency which is 1/3 or maybe 1/2 with high-temperature systems is the fuel burnup. Fuel burnup with light water reactors is about 1%. Breeder reactors can get something like 50% or even more out. That means the spent fuel stockpiles from our reactors still contains about 50x times the energy that has been extracted from it.

But right now the price of uranium is low enough so not many bother with this yet.

Nothing wrong with solar and wind of course but nuclear is also a good energy source.
 
#35
I've read that stationary power plants run at much higher efficiencies and produce lower emissions than ones that have to be small enough to fit under the hood of a car. For example, I'm pretty sure no automobile run's the exhaust through an electrostatic precipitator to recover any particulate matter. So, charging your Volt from a coal-fired power plant is not a contradiction.

Battery disposal is not a problem: they'll be recycled or remanufactured. That happens a lot already with lead-acid batteries, particularly any time the price of lead spikes.

Still, if you want to despair a little, browse through some magazines or newspapers from 10, 20, 30 years ago... in the early '90s, there were, in theory, government initiatives intended to convert a large portion of fleets to renewable energy. Way back in 1973, America was determined to become independent of foreign oil by 1980. Somehow, that didn't happen. National Geographic did a special issue devoted to energy back in 1981. There's a lot of familiar words and images there, like "global warming", mentions of hybrid cars, the risk of ethanol production affecting food prices, pictures of an oil sands effluent pond with workers installing a scarecrow to keep birds from landing. Hydrogen fuel is mentioned, but not considered practical because of the high cost of storage and pumping. Solar is ruled out because the cost per kw is 10x higher than conventional sources. Someone demonstrates how easy it is to convert a gasoline-powered car to run on methanol or ethanol.

A modest proposal would be for the new US president to slap a substantial tax on gasoline, which shouldn't be too unpopular now that pump prices are down, and put the proceeds towards synthetic fuel research and conversion. Require all new vehicles sold to be flexfuel. Google "methanol economy"; some eggheads are convinced that's the most practical alternative fuel. It can be brewed from stuff that isn't food ("wood alcohol"), made from natural gas, or coal, and converted to something that burns in diesel engines. There's a lot to be said for a fuel that can be poured and stored.
 
#37
$15 billion a year on windmills isn't a lot, if you consider that (if my back of envelope calculations are right), the US spends that much more on oil annually every time the price rises by $5 a barrel. (based on imports of about 10 million barrels per day, and figuring that the price of domestic oil also rises by the same amount thanks to the "free market".) If the price goes up by 50 or $100 a barrel, you're starting to talk about real money.

It's too bad there wasn't some plan in place requiring photovoltaic panels on new homes or substantial renos... at least all those junk mortgages would have bought some useful energy generating capacity, instead of marble countertops and glass-tiled bathrooms that will be torn out within 20 years because they're out of fashion.
 
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