Prometheus Fuels Lower Cost Than Fossil Fuels

kbd512 · 2021-10-28 02:55:01

As the wise old Dr Zubrin reminds us, every person humanity creates comes with a pair of hands and a brain. Human ingenuity is only constrained by what our minds can conceive of.

A former US Navy Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD) technician named Rob McGinnis went to Yale after leaving the service and earned a PhD in Environmental Engineering. He then proceeded to devise a method to produce gasoline, kerosene, and diesel fuels by electrochemically reversing the combustion process using CO2 captured from the atmosphere, entrained in water to produce alcohols, separated using Carbon NanoTubes, and then combined in a reactor to produce hydrocarbon products free of aromatics and contaminants like Sulfur.

The previous startup company that Dr McGinnis founded, named Oasis Water, devised a way to cut the energy usage from water desalination in half, also using electrochemistry, and that process has now been fully commercialized in China to desalinate sea water, with zero brine discharge, also known as "full water reuse". He patented a process called "forward osmosis". Dr McGinnis formed a second company prior to forming Prometheus Fuels, that developed the Carbon NanoTube membrane technology used by Prometheus Fuels, and is also of use for water desalination.

Dr. McGinnis is the first person to devise a "reverse combustion" process so efficient and precise in what it produces as output that the kerosene product from the sub-scale expriment came in at a spot price 1 US cent below the price of standard commercial / fossil Jet-A fuel purchased in California, with zero subsidies. The process used by Prometheus Fuels primarily uses energy input from wind and solar power, though far less than other competing processes, because no extreme heat or pressure is required due to the way the CO2 and alcohols are used. There are no separation processes, and instead the combination of electrochemistry and membranes are used to recombine chemicals as-desired.

Prometheus Fuels

Needless to say, the ability to suck in CO2 and sea water at one end to produce hydrocarbon fuels at the other end, is critical technology for Mars colonization, as is absolute minimization of the associated energy usage. If we were able to make gasoline / diesel / kerosene products on Mars, then there's no hard requirement to produce cryogenic fuels like Methane, so our go-to liquid rocket fuel for high thrust and high impulse density, namely RP-1, would make a perfectly viable fuel candidate for use on the red planet. There are numerous existing engines, to include the Merlin engines created by SpaceX, that use RP-1. While there are still very good reasons to favor the use Methane over RP-1, the ability to make and use a high grade kerosene fuel is incredibly important to continued expansion of humanity to other planets.

However, this new type of fuel synthesis technology is badly needed for Earthly uses to help mitigate the worst aspects climate change while still providing the high standard of living that about half of human civilization has grown accustomed to, and that the rest of humanity desperately wants to achieve, by using extremely energy-dense liquid hydrocarbon fuels produced from abundant but intermittent wind and solar energy sources, at very low cost.

Whereas all existing electrical energy storage technologies, namely batteries, are at least an order of magnitude less energy dense than hydrocarbon fuels, even when accounting for the efficiency differences between combustion engines and electric motors, a functionally limitless supply of infinitely recyclable liquid hydrocarbon fuels would assure humanity's continued prosperity until other forms of energy storage manage to achieve the same level of energy density as our existing hydrocarbon fuel technologies.

kbd512 · 2021-10-28 03:14:02

By the way, these devices are designed to fit in shipping containers and shipped using standard Class 8 trucks.

Edit:
Oddly enough, Dr McGinnis has brought up all the same issues that I've noted with using electricity for everything. It's cheaper and easier to make fuel in the deserts where solar power is abundant, and then ship manufactured fuel products through pipelines / rail / ships / trucks to points of use inside cities, negating the need for massive spending on electric grids, and all the over-consumption of raw materials and therefore energy usage, that that entails.

It's time for a combustion technology renaissance, enabled by addressing the central issues brought up by climate scientists. Our scientists have a real point, but life-sustaining hydrocarbon energy usage has been weaponized by politicians and mass media imbeciles for the express purpose of imposing their will on other people, via government, for entirely selfish reasons. After we take their toys away from them, we'll swiftly sort out who actually believes in science, as opposed to who is merely a petty tyrant masquerading as someone who cares about Earth's environment. Since none of the characters telling the general public to restrain personal energy usage bother with heeding their own admonishments, we can validly conclude that the sole purpose behind the incessant proselytizing of their religion to us, and for imposing burdensome and costly regulations on our lives, was to enrich themselves at our expenses.

Last edited by kbd512 (2021-10-28 03:43:12)

Spaniard · 2021-10-28 03:45:38

Sounds like marketing. "Reverse combustion". Generate fuel from water and CO2 is very old tecnology. The thermodynamic process is well known. On other side, there is a real processes more or less efficient, far from perfect ideal conditions, where someone could make an improvement.
But even in unrealistic ideal conditions, fuel can't be cheaper than the energy used to generate the fuel, and the energy used in the generation must be as big as the fuel.

And if the electricity from the sources are more expensive than the energy contained in the fuel, something is not right in the calculation.

My suspicious is that they are assuming a lot lower costs on energy generation than today values. Of course, is a possible scenario... in coming decades. But nothing new. Not real costs for today. And there is a lot of other projects that can do the same.

So, I think it's just marketing.

kbd512 · 2021-10-28 04:06:34

Spaniard,

All stored energy is stored at a net loss, in terms of output-to-input. The real question relates to the magnitude of the loss and where the input energy is coming from. I keep hearing about how abundant wind and sunlight are, so is that marketing hype? If it's not, then why can't we use some of it to make and store the most energy dense forms of fuel that are still easy to store and ship?

If we store energy in batteries, then we're constantly losing energy whenever we don't use it and the batteries are all 25 to 50 times less energy dense than hydrocarbon fuels. A gallon of gasoline is still a gallon of gasoline 2 months after it's produced. The same can't be said of charged-up Lithium-ion batteries or heat stored as a tank of hot water. A gallon of water pumped to a higher level is still a gallon of water with as much potential energy as that gallon contains, but it's nowhere near as much as a gallon of gasoline.

The US maintains a 1 month store of energy in hydrocarbon fuels. No country on this planet has a 1 month store of electricity in terms of batteries or latent heat storage. There may be some pumped hydro storage of that magnitude, but that's about it.

Sure, anything can be marketing hype, but American Airlines has already purchased the first 10 million gallons of their marketing hype, because no battery exists that AA can load up into the wings of their airliners, to make those aircraft fly for more than 15 minutes.

tahanson43206 · 2021-10-28 07:05:33

For kbd512 re new topic ...

As reported in the Other Space Organizations topic, the current issue of Analog contains a science fact article that explores in depth the possibility of replacing all fossil fuel supplied energy with nuclear fission.

The author ends up expressing doubt that the human race is psychologically capable of achieving such a replacement, even if there is enough Uranium to support the project. The work of Calliban in this forum (and sources he has referenced) show that Uranium need not be a limiting factor, because the supply available can be used to make more fuel from more abundant sources.

However, what I like about what I understand from your new topic here, is that if all that nuclear fission power were applied to making hydrocarbon fuels (dense energy carriers) from CO2 and water, then the population of Earth would be able to STOP burning buried gift stores of hydrocarbons.

There seems to be ** some ** sense of alarm wafting through the upper levels of the human population on Earth.

There ** is ** a concern arising from the prospect of unleashing ** that ** much nuclear fission power production .... the waste will accumulate at a rapid pace, and to this point, the human race has failed to find a solution.

Calliban has pointed out that some fission waste can be consumed in properly designed reactors, but the Analog author points out that while this is an effective treatment for particularly virulent species of waste, it only postpones the inevitable accounting.

The end product of all the daughter fragments of shatterned nucleii needs to be lead, and there is no way around the need for sufficient time for that to occur.

A solution that seems worth considering to me is to delivery nuclear waste to the subduction zones of the Earth's mantle, where material is drawn under an existing mantle. The time it takes material drawn under the mantle to return to the surface is measured in eons, so this would be a reasonable place to "store" nuclear waste.

In addition, the Earth core is a gigantic nuclear fission reactor (I understand) so it will take the human supplied waste in stride.

All-in-all, thanks for a most interesting new topic for the NewMars forum.

And! Thanks to Spaniard for keeping the conversation going!

(th)

kbd512 · 2021-10-28 12:01:21

tahanson43206,

I'm agnostic on our ultimate climate change solution, so long as it's an actual solution, rather than a convenient excuse for petty tyrants to impose their will on other people or to enslave them. I see nothing wrong with infinite recycling of atmospheric CO2, back into lakes of liquid hydrocarbons that human civilization needs and craves so very much. Any solution purporting to solve the problem, is not a solution if it leaves most of humanity destitute and in a state of perpetual energy poverty. None of these anti-human loudmouths purporting to care about the Earth are willing to go back to living the way they did before the industrial revolution. The way that you can tell is that they use technology to spew their anti-human rhetoric far and wide. As such, I say we take their favorite toy away from them so everyone else can watch how they reveal their true intentions and utter lack of fidelity to scientific principles. That said, enough about these insufferably stupid charlatans to their own cause. Moving on.

If you're anti-nuclear, but pro-wind and pro-solar, then a wind and solar driven energy storage technology that produces very energy-dense liquid hydrocarbon fuels is likely the only way to avoid using massive amounts of nuclear power. Spaniard has previously pointed out to me that nothing in physics forbids the creation of a battery as energy-dense as liquid hydrocarbon fuels. Thus far, humanity has utterly failed to produce a battery with an energy density equivalent to gasoline. I'm not at all confident that we will, within my lifetime, because I've been listening to the same tired song-and-dance since I've been alive. Much like the creation of a working fusion reactor or warp drive, whether or not physics specifically forbids it is immaterial to the fact that no human seems to be able to demonstrate how to actually do it.

We don't need "some day" technologies. We need "right now to very near future" technologies. It took the better part of 150 years for us to create a prosperous fossil fuel driven industrial economy from the agrarian economy that existed prior to industrialization. Absent a very practical and very cheap energy storage technology, nobody is going to snap their fingers and cause wind and solar to supplant hydrocarbons. Current battery technology is a joke compared to current hydrocarbon fuel technology. I'm sure that "some day" we'll solve every problem with battery technology and have batteries that last for decades and are as energy-dense as hydrocarbon fuels. Again, today is not that day.

The hydrocarbons supply the overwhelming majority that humanity presently uses for very good reasons. A gallon of gasoline stores 25 to 50 times more energy than any type of battery in existence. There's no such thing as "doing more with less", either. You can do more with more and less with less. If energy is cheap and abundant, than you can sustain rapid economic growth and assure human prosperity in any place where petty tyrants are swept aside for the benefit of the people. If we can use the wind and sun to produce an infinite supply of hydrocarbon energy storage that is cheaper than fossil fuel extraction from the word "go", then we should be able to perpetuate an infinite supply system so we can worry about how or if we can get rid of it when battery or other energy storage technologies are ready for prime time.

louis · 2021-10-28 14:16:25

Regarding Reverse Combustion (RC), it's clear that cost is the key factor, not energy efficiency.

If the cost of electricity from fossil fuels is 6 cents per KwHe but you can achieve RC by using cheap solar power (which in some cases can generate electricity at 1.8 cents per KwHe*), then even if you are using more energy to create the energy, the cost could still be cheaper than the fossil fuel. This isn't surprising in the sense that fossil fuels have to be dug up or sucked up out of the Earth, stored and then transported a long way. An onsite solar power facility using onsite free fuel (photons) has a head start from that point of view.

As Kbd points out, the great advantage here is that the RC fuels are a very flexible form of energy storage.

Of course, whether we want to carry on using such fuels if they cause pollution issues is another matter.

* The energy could be viewed as having an even lower marginal cost if we are talking about using surplus solar power.

kbd512 · 2021-10-28 15:50:31

Louis,

These fuels don't contain any Sulfur, no aromatic hydrocarbons (Benzene, Toluene, etc), and also produce lower NOx emissions. If you can obtain both light and heavy hydrocarbon fuels without drilling, without fracking, and without refineries, for less money than it costs to extract crude oil from the ground, then it wins on cost, the reduced pollution from combustion is an added bonus, and we take the environmental extremists' play toy away from them, so that everyone can see them as the petty wannabe tyrants that nearly all of them truly are. In the end, we will use the cheapest product on offer that both provides energy when demanded and does nothing to increase atmospheric CO2 levels.

Some people, like you, don't want nuclear power. Your real reason for not wanting it is that you're terrified of radiation due to Hollyweird movies that have the most tenuous connections to reality. However, after we moved away from the real reason, you said it costs too much while absolutely refusing to address the fact that 100% of all the wind and solar and battery infrastructure has to be replaced at least every 25 years, rather than every 75 years using solar thermal and nuclear thermal, and all of it was made using copious quantities of hydrocarbon fuels. Even if we made longer lasting wind turbine blades or photovoltaic cells, none of the control electronics will last for 25 years and that's where much of the true cost is. How can a piece of Silicon smaller than your fingernail cost hundreds to thousands of dollars? The energy and labor that went into making it, that's how.

Anyway, I told you I was agnostic about what the solution is, but I'm not agnostic on costs or environmental damage from excessive resource consumption trying to compensate for the dilute and intermittent nature of the energy provided by the wind and sunlight. Playing the "hide the true cost game" is a waste of time as well. Consumers inevitably pay for the total cost of the solution, but our working poor and middle class can least afford the cost increases associated with "electrical / electronic everything". Consumers pay more for power in Germany than in the US, because more expensive energy costs more money, period and end of story.

Regarding environmentalism, I don't want to live in a toxic wasteland. I'm pretty sure nobody else does, either. Lead, Cadmium, Arsenic, and Mercury used in electronics, like all commercial solar panels and batteries and electronics, are toxic forever. Most radioactive substances eventually decay into stable elements, and tiny quantities or radioactive wastes are involved by way of comparison. Anyway, that's my beef with electronic everything and attempting to store a week's worth of power in batteries or tanks of hot salts / metals / rocks. Sure, storing something is better than losing everything, but hydrocarbons will still be usable hydrocarbons six months into the future. You can push fuel through a pipeline to consume old stock in vehicles and then refresh it with new stock produced by wind and solar power. How do you consume old electrons if you don't need them for a month or two at a time? You can't, obviously. The material consumption and pollution associated with electronic everything is bat guano crazy. A never-ending waste stream of millions of tons of non-recyclable and/or toxic electronic waste is an absurdity. We need to kill the idea of planned obsolescence, bury it some place nobody will ever find it- kinda like Jimmy Hoffa, and reject the infatuation with faddish "new-ness", and embrace ultimate durability to minimize the need for recycling. New doesn't mean better, old doesn't mean better, accomplishing the same basic task in an even more practical way means better- to my way of thinking.

You can have wind and solar backed by hydrocarbon energy storage, or you can attempt to use some combination of solar / wind / nuclear to electrify absolutely everything, for whatever good that will do humanity. If it was practical and economic to electrify everything, then we would've done so by now. It's not, because it requires too much energy and therefore cost, and that's why we haven't done so already.

I can tell you that no matter what type of computer hack you attempt against my mechanical engine car, you're not moving it anywhere without direct physical access. You won't be able to turn it on, turn it off, or run it into a building while I'm driving around inside of it. It simply won't matter in the slightest if a nuclear war, computer virus, software glitch, or solar storm manages to fry every last microchip and battery on the planet. If I have a manual starter, my combustion engine will start and run and provide reliable service, period. I can fix it with a wire brush, a hammer, a screwdriver, and a socket wrench set. There are guys who machine the mating surfaces of existing engine blocks and cylinder heads using sandpaper and a sheet of glass. Yes, power tools are great to have when they work, but instant gratification costs real money. That "hand machining" process takes about 1 to 2 hours per head, about the same time for the top deck of the engine block, but no machine shop equipment and services are required. Absent many thousands of dollars worth of test equipment, any electronically-controlled engine or battery becomes a very stylish but otherwise useless paperweight the moment that some sensor, wiring connection, or microelectronic component fails. I want less of that, and more user-control over my own technology. Apart from washing machines / dryers / refrigerators / ovens, I'm not a big fan of non-repairable appliances.

I've already shown in another thread that a Tesla is about 50% to 60% more efficient than a modern naturally aspirated gasoline engine, after all the inefficiencies of electrical power transformation are taken into account, at the expense of being more than twice the initial purchase price of a comparable car, and utterly impossible to recycle in a meaningful way. It's so much more costly that the price differential represents around a half million miles of driving, by which point the mechanical parts of both vehicles are junk. The door handles on a Tesla cost as much to replace as my entire engine, because its based on a ridiculous electronic design wherein no expensive electronics are required, much less desirable to have.

The 500MWac Aktina solar project near where I live produces 631MWdc, meaning 131MWe worth of power is lost before the power touches the transmission lines. That implies that at least 20% of the power produced is lost at the solar farm, merely by converting it from DC to AC. I think that's an absurdity for a power generation technology widely touted for its efficiency. That means to assure nameplate power output over 25 years, by which time panel output has degraded to 85% of initial output, you need a bare minimum of a 35% over-capacity. All the conversions between the farm and your outlet lose another 10% to 15% of the energy transmitted, which is why it's utterly impractical to produce power in Africa and then ship it to the UK using undersea power cables. 131MW of power is enough to produce quite a bit of fuel for energy storage. If we had that much waste energy to play with on Mars, for example, then we could refuel our Starship within a few months or so. Anyway, the fuel produced onsite can then be pumped through a series of pipelines, at minimal transport cost. For a solar thermal planet, it could be used onsite and the power pushed through the same infrastructure at night, negating the requirement for two or more separate power plants.

SpaceNut · 2021-10-28 17:21:11

Sounds like wire gauge mismatch and length of them as well as the convertor inverter components.
Then again the multiple solar panels connection to the common point is an issue as the panels wiring are designed for short runs and the size of the field of panels means more drop is in those runs.

louis · 2021-10-28 17:42:14

kbd512 wrote:

Louis,
These fuels don't contain any Sulfur, no aromatic hydrocarbons (Benzene, Toluene, etc), and also produce lower NOx emissions. If you can obtain both light and heavy hydrocarbon fuels without drilling, without fracking, and without refineries, for less money than it costs to extract crude oil from the ground, then it wins on cost, the reduced pollution from combustion is an added bonus, and we take the environmental extremists' play toy away from them, so that everyone can see them as the petty wannabe tyrants that nearly all of them truly are. In the end, we will use the cheapest product on offer that both provides energy when demanded and does nothing to increase atmospheric CO2 levels.

Good news on the pollution. Makes it much more attractive.

You can also add it wins out on energy independence - certainly for the USA, where the fuel could be produced in the South West states economically I expect.

Some people, like you, don't want nuclear power. Your real reason for not wanting it is that you're terrified of radiation due to Hollyweird movies that have the most tenuous connections to reality. However, after we moved away from the real reason, you said it costs too much while absolutely refusing to address the fact that 100% of all the wind and solar and battery infrastructure has to be replaced at least every 25 years, rather than every 75 years using solar thermal and nuclear thermal, and all of it was made using copious quantities of hydrocarbon fuels. Even if we made longer lasting wind turbine blades or photovoltaic cells, none of the control electronics will last for 25 years and that's where much of the true cost is. How can a piece of Silicon smaller than your fingernail cost hundreds to thousands of dollars? The energy and labor that went into making it, that's how.

I think my "fear" of nuclear is perfectly valid and proven. I recall being on holiday in Greece shortly after the events at Chernobyl. No lamb was available on the menu despite Greece being maybe over a 1000 miles from the epicentre. We couldn't eat lamb from Wales for several years - and the UK is thousands of miles away. Moreover, and perhaps more importantly in some ways, the terrorist threat is not something I've imagined...

It is possible the Flight 93 terrorists were planning to attack a nuclear power station. Al Queda certainly had an interest in attempting to do so. And the following report makes clear nuclear power stations were never built to withstand a Jumbo Jet being flown into it at 600 MPH. It's anyone's guess what damage would be caused by such an attack (and there are many other potential terrorist attack targets).

https://www.parliament.uk/globalassets/ … tpr222.pdf

So you can't just brush off either the threat of accidents and terrorism as you have a tendency to do.

As I have made clear nuclear power is a much option for Mars because there you really can site your power stations away from human settlements and human agriculture and the threat of terrorism is neglible in any case. Moreover, nuclear heat would be useful on Mars for terraformation. So, I am not ruling that out, though it's clearly not going to be at the heart of the early missions.

Anyway, I told you I was agnostic about what the solution is, but I'm not agnostic on costs or environmental damage from excessive resource consumption trying to compensate for the dilute and intermittent nature of the energy provided by the wind and sunlight. Playing the "hide the true cost game" is a waste of time as well. Consumers inevitably pay for the total cost of the solution, but our working poor and middle class can least afford the cost increases associated with "electrical / electronic everything". Consumers pay more for power in Germany than in the US, because more expensive energy costs more money, period and end of story.

I agree consumers (or taxpayers or both) pay for the total cost. However, we can also see how technology has already and will continue to transform the cost profile of green energy. Once technology delivers on storage, we will see the total green energy system cost start to get much closer to the cost of green energy at source. There are so many promising technologies available for storage now, that I feel confident the storage solution is going to be resolved. If battery costs continue to fall and storage density continues to improve (to say 0.3 KwH per Kg), it becomes economical eventually for countries in more northerly latitudes to send 500,000 ton battery tankers to be charged in desert areas further south or even to go "sun fishing" themselves on the oceans. One 500,000 ton tanker might have a total charge of 150 GwHes - probably something like 18% of UK current electricity usage on one day. So a fleet of maybe 20 such vessels travelling between Morocco or the South Atlantic and the UK could probably provide all our current electricity needs (but of course wind energy and other green energy sources can supply a large proportion as well).

Regarding environmentalism, I don't want to live in a toxic wasteland. I'm pretty sure nobody else does, either. Lead, Cadmium, Arsenic, and Mercury used in electronics, like all commercial solar panels and batteries and electronics, are toxic forever. Most radioactive substances eventually decay into stable elements, and tiny quantities or radioactive wastes are involved by way of comparison. Anyway, that's my beef with electronic everything and attempting to store a week's worth of power in batteries or tanks of hot salts / metals / rocks. Sure, storing something is better than losing everything, but hydrocarbons will still be usable hydrocarbons six months into the future. You can push fuel through a pipeline to consume old stock in vehicles and then refresh it with new stock produced by wind and solar power. How do you consume old electrons if you don't need them for a month or two at a time? You can't, obviously. The material consumption and pollution associated with electronic everything is bat guano crazy. A never-ending waste stream of millions of tons of non-recyclable and/or toxic electronic waste is an absurdity. We need to kill the idea of planned obsolescence, bury it some place nobody will ever find it- kinda like Jimmy Hoffa, and reject the infatuation with faddish "new-ness", and embrace ultimate durability to minimize the need for recycling. New doesn't mean better, old doesn't mean better, accomplishing the same basic task in an even more practical way means better- to my way of thinking.

I think you are probably stuck in the past on recycling. Huge strides have been taken in dealing with the recycling challenges of green energy. Cheaper green energy allows for more sophisticated (and costly) recycling techniques.

You can have wind and solar backed by hydrocarbon energy storage, or you can attempt to use some combination of solar / wind / nuclear to electrify absolutely everything, for whatever good that will do humanity. If it was practical and economic to electrify everything, then we would've done so by now. It's not, because it requires too much energy and therefore cost, and that's why we haven't done so already.

That's not clear at all. Electric power lines for trucks on motorways could make a lot of sense:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_3P_S7pL7Yg

Individual truck operators can't afford to put the infrastructure in place. But once it's there it becomes a very economical means of transport for them. (See from 2:20).

I can tell you that no matter what type of computer hack you attempt against my mechanical engine car, you're not moving it anywhere without direct physical access. You won't be able to turn it on, turn it off, or run it into a building while I'm driving around inside of it. It simply won't matter in the slightest if a nuclear war, computer virus, software glitch, or solar storm manages to fry every last microchip and battery on the planet. If I have a manual starter, my combustion engine will start and run and provide reliable service, period. I can fix it with a wire brush, a hammer, a screwdriver, and a socket wrench set. There are guys who machine the mating surfaces of existing engine blocks and cylinder heads using sandpaper and a sheet of glass. Yes, power tools are great to have when they work, but instant gratification costs real money. That "hand machining" process takes about 1 to 2 hours per head, about the same time for the top deck of the engine block, but no machine shop equipment and services are required. Absent many thousands of dollars worth of test equipment, any electronically-controlled engine or battery becomes a very stylish but otherwise useless paperweight the moment that some sensor, wiring connection, or microelectronic component fails. I want less of that, and more user-control over my own technology. Apart from washing machines / dryers / refrigerators / ovens, I'm not a big fan of non-repairable appliances.
I've already shown in another thread that a Tesla is about 50% to 60% more efficient than a modern naturally aspirated gasoline engine, after all the inefficiencies of electrical power transformation are taken into account, at the expense of being more than twice the initial purchase price of a comparable car, and utterly impossible to recycle in a meaningful way. It's so much more costly that the price differential represents around a half million miles of driving, by which point the mechanical parts of both vehicles are junk. The door handles on a Tesla cost as much to replace as my entire engine, because its based on a ridiculous electronic design wherein no expensive electronics are required, much less desirable to have.

It's still early days. SAIC/General Motors have come up with a mass market low price EV costing something like $4000:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Ytqr8T05OU

The 500MWac Aktina solar project near where I live produces 631MWdc, meaning 131MWe worth of power is lost before the power touches the transmission lines. That implies that at least 20% of the power produced is lost at the solar farm, merely by converting it from DC to AC. I think that's an absurdity for a power generation technology widely touted for its efficiency. That means to assure nameplate power output over 25 years, by which time panel output has degraded to 85% of initial output, you need a bare minimum of a 35% over-capacity. All the conversions between the farm and your outlet lose another 10% to 15% of the energy transmitted, which is why it's utterly impractical to produce power in Africa and then ship it to the UK using undersea power cables. 131MW of power is enough to produce quite a bit of fuel for energy storage. If we had that much waste energy to play with on Mars, for example, then we could refuel our Starship within a few months or so. Anyway, the fuel produced onsite can then be pumped through a series of pipelines, at minimal transport cost. For a solar thermal planet, it could be used onsite and the power pushed through the same infrastructure at night, negating the requirement for two or more separate power plants.

All these new technologies are opening up lots of opportunities for more efficient ways of operating.

kbd512 · 2021-10-29 11:32:53

Louis,

Your inability to eat lamb was a function of media-induced hysteria over Chernobyl, not an actual threat of radiation poisoning. None of the absurd predictions about Chernobyl came to pass. Your anecdote proves nothing, except that far too many people are terrified of things they can't see, kinda like the media-induced mass hysteria over the COVID virus.

A jumbo jet flying into a steel-reinforced concrete dome four feet thick would not damage the reactor core. The twin towers were paper-thin structures by design, in order to save money, which is why the jets penetrated so deeply. The steel structural columns in the building chopped up the airliners into small pieces. The exterior support columns were Aluminum-clad and severely corrosion damaged as a result (why no other buildings use Aluminum-clad steel- because cracking of the coating combined with salty water vapor turns the cladding into Thermite). The much more substantially built Pentagon building stopped the other jumbo jet cold, upon impact with the outer ring, despite being nowhere near as thick as a reactor containment dome.

It's physically impossible for a jumbo jet to attain 600mph at sea level in level flight due to aerodynamic drag and available engine power, but maybe you could put one in a near-vertical dive and maybe you could sustain the dive long enough to strike the containment building before excessive aero loads ripped the wings off. Still possible? Sure, anything's possible.

I agree consumers (or taxpayers or both) pay for the total cost. However, we can also see how technology has already and will continue to transform the cost profile of green energy. Once technology delivers on storage, we will see the total green energy system cost start to get much closer to the cost of green energy at source. There are so many promising technologies available for storage now, that I feel confident the storage solution is going to be resolved.

Yeah, well some of us are tired of paying for things that don't provide practical function, that we then have to pay for all over again, every 10 to 25 years. Replacing 100% of your power generation and storage infrastructure that frequently is not economical, let alone practical, even if economics is entirely ignored. Technology has already delivered on energy storage. It's called gasoline or kerosene or diesel fuel. There's no battery technology I've seen that's the least bit "promising" when compared to liquid hydrocarbon fuels. Orders of magnitude have meaning in the realm of mechanical engineering, even if you don't understand or accept or willfully ignore them for ideological reasons.

If battery costs continue to fall and storage density continues to improve (to say 0.3 KwH per Kg), it becomes economical eventually for countries in more northerly latitudes to send 500,000 ton battery tankers to be charged in desert areas further south or even to go "sun fishing" themselves on the oceans. One 500,000 ton tanker might have a total charge of 150 GwHes - probably something like 18% of UK current electricity usage on one day. So a fleet of maybe 20 such vessels travelling between Morocco or the South Atlantic and the UK could probably provide all our current electricity needs (but of course wind energy and other green energy sources can supply a large proportion as well).

Battery costs haven't fallen, though. We have improved batteries that cost more money. The problem is that the improvement, relative to the money spent, is not proportional. A 500,000t "battery tanker" won't weigh 500,000t. Batteries are not liquids that distribute weight evenly across the entire hull structure, either.

At current prices of $50/kWh, each 150GWh battery would cost $7.5 billion dollars, which is 1.5 times the entire construction cost of the 1GWe class Watts-Bar #2 nuclear reactor, which produces as much energy as this battery would store, in just 6.25 days. Your government balked at paying for a single Ford class nuclear powered aircraft carrier, but you're somehow going to pay for a fleet of 20 of these ships. Sure, that seems probable. This "battery ship" concept is starting to look a lot like your fanciful solar-powered airliner concept. It looks great on paper, apart from the fact that it could never generate enough power to remain above stall speed at high noon over a desert.

So, how much energy does 500,000t / 500,000,000kg of crude oil provide?

crude oil is around 44MJ/kg, 1MJ = 0.2777kWh, or 12,222Wh per kilogram

500,000,000 * 12,222 = 6,111,000,000,000 = 6,111GWh per load

6111 / 150 = 40.74

A single impractically-large crude oil carrier has delivered twice as much energy per load as your entire proposed fleet of ships could possibly deliver. We go through this increasingly pointless basic math exercise every time you assert your ideology and it's contradicted by the physical world. Gravity doesn't care about your "green ideology" and it never will. None of us get to negotiate terms with gravity. Your ideology is a belief about the physical world that will only ever be applicable to what you think. Gravity, on the other hand, is a tangible manifestation of the physical world, i.e. "gravity is real". No belief, lack of belief, or acceptance is required. If you jump off a bridge, you can profess total devotion to your "green energy god" all you want, but there's only one direction you're headed, because gravity is real and religious beliefs about gravity are not. My contention is that more than enough people have died over religious beliefs not grounded in plainly observable evidence. We don't need to conduct any further "science experiments" with humanity's energy supply to determine that orders of magnitude have meaning.

Moving on from that simple math problem, everyone else besides you (because every bit of engineering knowledge Calliban or I impart to you goes in one ear and out the other) knows why we use crude oil or natural gas for energy storage, rather than batteries. Concentrated energy is more practical than dilute energy for powering machines that must move to do useful work, every day of the week. Despite the fact that it's merely possible to use dilute energy to power said machinery, doesn't make dilute energy more suitable for the intended purpose, never mind practical.

Anyway...

We built a grand total of 1 Seawise Giant (same weight class as the type of ship you're proposing), and then decommissioned it because it was so difficult to hazard that it wasn't a practical ship. Seawise Giant couldn't safely navigate the English Channel due to its draft (part of the hull below the waterline), for example. The turning circle was 2 miles at very low speed and it took 5.5 miles to stop from full speed of 16.5 knots.

Regarding terrorism, have you so much as thought about where your power will be coming from if you send ships of that size to an Islamic country, when the muslims living there decide to seize those ships or sink them because they don't want westerners in their countries?

Let me guess, terrorism won't be a problem, because "green energy" is involved.

But what if no terrorism was ever required?

What if one of the millions of batteries catches fire and turns the entire ship into the world's largest arc welding experiment?

The $150 billion dollars spent on the batteries alone is not chump change, even for the UK's government. The actual battery packs and the vessels to hold them will add many more billions to the total price tag. You'll be replacing those batteries every 10 years or so, or whenever the slightest manufacturing defect in a single battery cell incinerates the entire ship.

Over 10 years, that's only about 1% of your government's annual budget, so it's certainly doable in terms of dollars or pounds sterling, but the same amount of money would purchase 30 Watts-Bar #2 1GWe PWRs, which would supply over 91% of the UK's total electricity usage during 2020. The reactors will continue to operate safely over 75 years, rather than 10 years. Precisely 0 Lithium-ion batteries made this year will still be operational 75 years from now.

That type of insanity is why I continually point out how wretched this "green ideology" nonsense truly is. Someone with your ideology would force your fellow countrymen to spend enough money over the next 75 years to pay for re-powering the entire UK with nuclear power, 7 TIMES OVER, then whine about how expensive nuclear power is. If you had your way, you'd force everyone else to spend enough money on batteries alone to pay for 7 TIMES the total electrical power that the UK actually consumes, all to prop up your ideology, or maybe to pad your pocket book if you hold stock in these "green energy" companies.

I think you are probably stuck in the past on recycling. Huge strides have been taken in dealing with the recycling challenges of green energy. Cheaper green energy allows for more sophisticated (and costly) recycling techniques.

I think I'm probably stuck on current reality, and you're probably stuck in fantasy land. Your "green energy" isn't cheaper when recycling is required, as it eventually will be, which is why so many toxic solar panels and batteries end up in landfills where they contaminate the ground water with Arsenic, Lead, Cadmium, and Mercury.

The people who actually make the solar panels, not people like you who are blindly making assertions without evidence, say it'll never be cost-effective to recycle them in terms of labor and energy, so more government mandates, which I know you love so much, will be required to force the solar panel and battery farm operators to pay for the costs associated with recycling of their toxic products.

Who has time to worry about terrorism when your purported "solutions" are deliberately making entire areas of land uninhabitable, all to support these "green fantasies"?

Much like the coal industry, the wind turbine and electric motor industry is responsible for a greater total radiation release than the entirety of the nuclear power industry, even when you include all nuclear accidents. All of that Thorium that the miners dig up with the rare Earth metals, they simply spread it over vast areas of land, until the EPA or some other governmental agency shuts them down or bankrupts them by forcing them to clean it up.

All these new technologies are opening up lots of opportunities for more efficient ways of operating.

If only that was true. Some solutions are clearly better than others. We don't need to take every unworkable idea to its logical maxim in order to determine that it's not practical.

louis · 2021-10-30 18:29:53

kbd512 wrote:

Louis,
Your inability to eat lamb was a function of media-induced hysteria over Chernobyl, not an actual threat of radiation poisoning. None of the absurd predictions about Chernobyl came to pass. Your anecdote proves nothing, except that far too many people are terrified of things they can't see, kinda like the media-induced mass hysteria over the COVID virus.

Well in both cases you are disputing the view of public health officials. I am not saying public health officials are always right - in fact on Covid they have been demonstrably wrong. But back in the day even Soviet public health officials - not known for their huge concern regarding the citizenry appeared to take Chernobyl pretty seriously. The point about sheep as I understand it is that their bodies can concentrate the perhaps fairly low level radiation as they chomp their way through thousands of kilograms of grass.

A jumbo jet flying into a steel-reinforced concrete dome four feet thick would not damage the reactor core. The twin towers were paper-thin structures by design, in order to save money, which is why the jets penetrated so deeply. The steel structural columns in the building chopped up the airliners into small pieces. The exterior support columns were Aluminum-clad and severely corrosion damaged as a result (why no other buildings use Aluminum-clad steel- because cracking of the coating combined with salty water vapor turns the cladding into Thermite). The much more substantially built Pentagon building stopped the other jumbo jet cold, upon impact with the outer ring, despite being nowhere near as thick as a reactor containment dome.
It's physically impossible for a jumbo jet to attain 600mph at sea level in level flight due to aerodynamic drag and available engine power, but maybe you could put one in a near-vertical dive and maybe you could sustain the dive long enough to strike the containment building before excessive aero loads ripped the wings off. Still possible? Sure, anything's possible.

Government and MIT put the closing speed of the second WTC jets at between about 530 and 590 MPH. My 600 MPH is not far off. You may be right about the Pentagon being a better analogy but nobody really knows what would happen if you flew a Jumbo Jet into a reactor building. We saw at WTC that another building never hit by the aeroplanes collapsed because of associated damage - so even if a plane did not break the barrier, there is as yet no knowing what damage might occur inside and the reactor core is not the only potential source of a radiation leak.

There was destruction and collapse at the Pentagon:

"even though 26 first-floor cement columns were completely destroyed and 15 others severely damaged by the fiery crash"

https://www.history.com/news/pentagon-d … 11-attacks

(It's an interesting read.)

Intuitively I feel a dome is a more fragile structure than pillars, walls and ramps. I may be wrong but doesn't each part of a dome support the other part (similar to how an arch works) so damage to one part of a dome could be catastrophic to the whole structure?

I agree consumers (or taxpayers or both) pay for the total cost. However, we can also see how technology has already and will continue to transform the cost profile of green energy. Once technology delivers on storage, we will see the total green energy system cost start to get much closer to the cost of green energy at source. There are so many promising technologies available for storage now, that I feel confident the storage solution is going to be resolved.
Yeah, well some of us are tired of paying for things that don't provide practical function, that we then have to pay for all over again, every 10 to 25 years. Replacing 100% of your power generation and storage infrastructure that frequently is not economical, let alone practical, even if economics is entirely ignored. Technology has already delivered on energy storage. It's called gasoline or kerosene or diesel fuel. There's no battery technology I've seen that's the least bit "promising" when compared to liquid hydrocarbon fuels. Orders of magnitude have meaning in the realm of mechanical engineering, even if you don't understand or accept or willfully ignore them for ideological reasons.

Well it depends on how you view practical function. For me energy independence and domestic economic stimulus are two very positive aspects of green energy. We have also seen over the last 50 years that increased energy costs lead to increased energy efficiency so that overall cost rise does not reflect unit cost rise. Just about everything is now way more energy efficient than a few decades ago.

That said, I really do believe we are about to win big on green energy. It could be in fact the biggest ever economic gain experienced on the planet as real energy costs decline rapidly over a couple of decades. These aren't just my thoughts, they are the conclusions of a lot of energy analysts who ponder these things in more detail than I ever can.

If battery costs continue to fall and storage density continues to improve (to say 0.3 KwH per Kg), it becomes economical eventually for countries in more northerly latitudes to send 500,000 ton battery tankers to be charged in desert areas further south or even to go "sun fishing" themselves on the oceans. One 500,000 ton tanker might have a total charge of 150 GwHes - probably something like 18% of UK current electricity usage on one day. So a fleet of maybe 20 such vessels travelling between Morocco or the South Atlantic and the UK could probably provide all our current electricity needs (but of course wind energy and other green energy sources can supply a large proportion as well).
Battery costs haven't fallen, though. We have improved batteries that cost more money. The problem is that the improvement, relative to the money spent, is not proportional. A 500,000t "battery tanker" won't weigh 500,000t. Batteries are not liquids that distribute weight evenly across the entire hull structure, either.
At current prices of $50/kWh, each 150GWh battery would cost $7.5 billion dollars, which is 1.5 times the entire construction cost of the 1GWe class Watts-Bar #2 nuclear reactor, which produces as much energy as this battery would store, in just 6.25 days. Your government balked at paying for a single Ford class nuclear powered aircraft carrier, but you're somehow going to pay for a fleet of 20 of these ships. Sure, that seems probable. This "battery ship" concept is starting to look a lot like your fanciful solar-powered airliner concept. It looks great on paper, apart from the fact that it could never generate enough power to remain above stall speed at high noon over a desert.
So, how much energy does 500,000t / 500,000,000kg of crude oil provide?
crude oil is around 44MJ/kg, 1MJ = 0.2777kWh, or 12,222Wh per kilogram
500,000,000 * 12,222 = 6,111,000,000,000 = 6,111GWh per load
6111 / 150 = 40.74
A single impractically-large crude oil carrier has delivered twice as much energy per load as your entire proposed fleet of ships could possibly deliver. We go through this increasingly pointless basic math exercise every time you assert your ideology and it's contradicted by the physical world. Gravity doesn't care about your "green ideology" and it never will. None of us get to negotiate terms with gravity. Your ideology is a belief about the physical world that will only ever be applicable to what you think. Gravity, on the other hand, is a tangible manifestation of the physical world, i.e. "gravity is real". No belief, lack of belief, or acceptance is required. If you jump off a bridge, you can profess total devotion to your "green energy god" all you want, but there's only one direction you're headed, because gravity is real and religious beliefs about gravity are not. My contention is that more than enough people have died over religious beliefs not grounded in plainly observable evidence. We don't need to conduct any further "science experiments" with humanity's energy supply to determine that orders of magnitude have meaning.
Moving on from that simple math problem, everyone else besides you (because every bit of engineering knowledge Calliban or I impart to you goes in one ear and out the other) knows why we use crude oil or natural gas for energy storage, rather than batteries. Concentrated energy is more practical than dilute energy for powering machines that must move to do useful work, every day of the week. Despite the fact that it's merely possible to use dilute energy to power said machinery, doesn't make dilute energy more suitable for the intended purpose, never mind practical.
Anyway...
We built a grand total of 1 Seawise Giant (same weight class as the type of ship you're proposing), and then decommissioned it because it was so difficult to hazard that it wasn't a practical ship. Seawise Giant couldn't safely navigate the English Channel due to its draft (part of the hull below the waterline), for example. The turning circle was 2 miles at very low speed and it took 5.5 miles to stop from full speed of 16.5 knots.
Regarding terrorism, have you so much as thought about where your power will be coming from if you send ships of that size to an Islamic country, when the muslims living there decide to seize those ships or sink them because they don't want westerners in their countries?
Let me guess, terrorism won't be a problem, because "green energy" is involved.
But what if no terrorism was ever required?
What if one of the millions of batteries catches fire and turns the entire ship into the world's largest arc welding experiment?
The $150 billion dollars spent on the batteries alone is not chump change, even for the UK's government. The actual battery packs and the vessels to hold them will add many more billions to the total price tag. You'll be replacing those batteries every 10 years or so, or whenever the slightest manufacturing defect in a single battery cell incinerates the entire ship.
Over 10 years, that's only about 1% of your government's annual budget, so it's certainly doable in terms of dollars or pounds sterling, but the same amount of money would purchase 30 Watts-Bar #2 1GWe PWRs, which would supply over 91% of the UK's total electricity usage during 2020. The reactors will continue to operate safely over 75 years, rather than 10 years. Precisely 0 Lithium-ion batteries made this year will still be operational 75 years from now.
That type of insanity is why I continually point out how wretched this "green ideology" nonsense truly is. Someone with your ideology would force your fellow countrymen to spend enough money over the next 75 years to pay for re-powering the entire UK with nuclear power, 7 TIMES OVER, then whine about how expensive nuclear power is. If you had your way, you'd force everyone else to spend enough money on batteries alone to pay for 7 TIMES the total electrical power that the UK actually consumes, all to prop up your ideology, or maybe to pad your pocket book if you hold stock in these "green energy" companies.
I think you are probably stuck in the past on recycling. Huge strides have been taken in dealing with the recycling challenges of green energy. Cheaper green energy allows for more sophisticated (and costly) recycling techniques.
I think I'm probably stuck on current reality, and you're probably stuck in fantasy land. Your "green energy" isn't cheaper when recycling is required, as it eventually will be, which is why so many toxic solar panels and batteries end up in landfills where they contaminate the ground water with Arsenic, Lead, Cadmium, and Mercury.
The people who actually make the solar panels, not people like you who are blindly making assertions without evidence, say it'll never be cost-effective to recycle them in terms of labor and energy, so more government mandates, which I know you love so much, will be required to force the solar panel and battery farm operators to pay for the costs associated with recycling of their toxic products.
Who has time to worry about terrorism when your purported "solutions" are deliberately making entire areas of land uninhabitable, all to support these "green fantasies"?
Much like the coal industry, the wind turbine and electric motor industry is responsible for a greater total radiation release than the entirety of the nuclear power industry, even when you include all nuclear accidents. All of that Thorium that the miners dig up with the rare Earth metals, they simply spread it over vast areas of land, until the EPA or some other governmental agency shuts them down or bankrupts them by forcing them to clean it up.
All these new technologies are opening up lots of opportunities for more efficient ways of operating.
If only that was true. Some solutions are clearly better than others. We don't need to take every unworkable idea to its logical maxim in order to determine that it's not practical.

The price of batteries has declined by 97% in the last three decades

https://ourworldindata.org/battery-price-decline

So battery price has declined hugely while oil price in real terms has remained pretty steady over the same period.

Most analysts think these cost falls are going to continue into the future and I would agree entirely as we see work on much cheaper battery technologies come to fruition. I think the cost reduction is going to accelerate because we are moving from expensive materials to cheap ones. Simples, really.

You don't have to go up the Channel with a tanker that size. You could dock at Milford Haven in Wales for instance.

I only mentioned the battery tanker idea as something that becomes possibly economical as battery price reduces. I think it's an intriguing approach and not one I've ever seen put forward elsewhere - so I am claiming credit for it here.

Of course, yes plugging into a grid in a foreign state doesn't deliver energy independence. But it it is more flexible - you can plug in anywhere that has the top rate insolation. And as I mentioned, there is also the possiblity of developing your own oceanic solar power operation (trailing solar panels on the surface of the sea and through large solar "sails") in the South Atlantic, always tracking the areas of highest insolation.

kbd512 · 2021-10-30 23:44:01

Louis,

Public health officials are well known for overreacting, no matter the threat. The Soviets were still humans, despite our attempts to de-humanize them, and their public health officials were still medical doctors, which means they were prone to overreacting. We were supposed to have tens of thousands of excess cancer deaths from Chernobyl. That never happened. It never happened because it was a hysteria-based assertion from people who obviously had very little understanding of radiation casualties.

Flight 11 hit the second World Trade Center tower at 466mph. Building 7 collapsed because it was built the same way as the twin towers. It was also set on fire by flaming debris that fell on top of it, which also cut through the fire main system. All buildings that collapsed used the same construction methods. That's why they fell at near freefall speed. The exact same thing happened to that the hi-rise condo building in Brazil that was never hit by an airplane, it was also set ablaze via the central elevator shaft, and also collapsed at near freefall speed. It was a fundamentally horrible design, heavily questioned at the time it was designed (in the words of an architect who resigned over what he saw as the WTC's fatal design flaw- "the WTC tower design flew in the face of everything I was taught about architectural engineering in college"), those doing the questioning resigned or were fired, and they proceeded to build the WTC towers with those flaws anyway, because they were going to "save a lot of money". That was the 1970s. Famously flammable and toxic curtains and upholstery, asbestos insulation, Ford Pinto fuel tanks, Aluminum wiring without proper wiring gauge or insulation, etc. Basically, the commercial world did lots of stupid stuff to save money, and pretty much all of it backfired spectacularly.

A nuclear reactor's containment dome, on the other hand... These structures range in thickness from 2.5 feet to 12 feet thick. The concrete is typically double the density of ordinary concrete in order to stop radiation. They're designed to survive blast overpressures of 50psi or more. No skyscraper in the world can survive that.

An Integral Numerical Analysis of Impact of a Commercial Aircraft on Nuclear Containment

Simulated Aircraft Impact Analysis on Nuclear Power Plants to Global Body of Research

From the article:

Testing containment buildings is nothing new. In 1988, Sandia National Laboratories conducted a strength test on a large concrete block by slamming a fully loaded F-4 Phantom jet directly at it to investigate the survivability of a nuclear power plant in the event of an attack. The jet disintegrated upon impact while the concrete block remained relatively unscathed. The 482mph impact left only a 64mm deep gouge in the 3.66m wide block from an impact force of over 700 G. Subsequent studies concluded that commercial airliners did not pose a danger.
Compared to previous studies in this field, this work goes a step further by analyzing the effect of aging on the impact response of an APR1400 RCB,” said Almuhairi. “With aging, the RCB’s materials degrade, and as a result, the load-bearing capacity could be compromised. In the event of an aircraft impact on an aged RCB, the structural integrity might be lost.”
Three degradation mechanisms were considered in modeling the aging of the containment: liner corrosion, rebar corrosion, and pre-stress loss of tendons.
“The impact an Airbus A320 would have on the RCB for the APR1400 was investigated using finite element analysis,” said Almuhairi. “A new modeling approach was developed to determine the impact pressure of the aircraft, taking into account the change of the aircraft’s cross section during crushing and dividing the impact into three stages.
“We found that the unaged RCB is able to withstand the impact load of an Airbus A320 aircraft without liner or rebar failure for impact velocities as great as 300 m/s,” explained Almuhairi. “While aging the RCB caused the plastic liner and rebar strains to increase, the structural integrity of the RCB was maintained for most cases. Full penetration of the RCB was reported only for the unlikely event of an A320 impacting a highly degraded RCB (where all degradation mechanisms were applied simultaneously) at a velocity of 300m/s, a scenario that is judged very unlikely to occur during the design life of 60 years.”
Results from studies by the Electric Power Research Institute support Almuhairi’s findings: penetrating even weak reinforced concrete requires multiple hits by high speed artillery shells or specially-designed ‘bunker busting’ artillery—both of which are well beyond what intentional human damage methods are likely to cause. Nuclear reactors are more resistant to attacks from large aircraft than virtually any other civil installations, according to the World Nuclear Association, and Almuhairi’s research contributes to this growing body of evidence while providing peace of mind in case of nefarious intent.

300m/s is 671mph

The Russians seem pretty confident that the reactor would not only survive but the containment would still be capable of maintaining its ability to withstand its pressure load limit after such an attack:

CONTAINMENT ULTIMATE PRESSURE CAPACITY WITH CONSIDERATION OF AIRCRAFT IMPACT

We don't make any rocket propellant tanks with squared off end plates, do we?

No, of course we don't.

And why don't we do that, since it would be a lot cheaper and easier to do?

It couldn't be because arches are much stronger, could it?

We have also seen over the last 50 years that increased energy costs lead to increased energy efficiency so that overall cost rise does not reflect unit cost rise. Just about everything is now way more energy efficient than a few decades ago.

Total energy consumption has only ever gone up! Way, way up!

Increased energy efficiency has done zero / zip / zilch / nada / nothing for total energy consumption, period and end of story. That statement is unequivocally true, in absolute terms.

We've continually seen what mass manufacturing can do to reduce costs of products that were previously not mass manufactured, but that's not your claim here.

LED lightbulbs cost more than incandescent lightbulbs, even with mass manufacturing of LEDs. LEDs will always cost more, because the embodied energy is much higher. I would argue, as I'm sure you would, that LEDs are demonstrably "better" at producing light than Tungsten filaments, but no matter what you or I or anyone else asserts, the embodied energy in the materials that go into making LED lightbulbs is much higher than it is for incandescent bulbs.

That is why LEDs cost more than incandescent bulbs. It's not magic. It's not rocket science. It's basic economics. It's the economics of energy expenditure. If the manufacturer is obliged to use more expensive materials to make any product, then you, as the consumer, are also obliged to pay more per unit of product, or else the business goes out of business, and then you no longer have any lightbulbs.

Up to a point, I'm perfectly willing to pay more money for LEDs to save money (energy expenditure, ultimately) on electricity, because over their lifetime, I pay less money and receive more photons, but this paradigm has limitations. A battery that costs as much as a car is not a good deal, though. It's not less expensive than gasoline, unless I deliberately manipulate the price of gasoline to make gasoline more expensive than the battery. If the battery was a good deal, then the government wouldn't subsidize electric vehicles. Consumers would do simple math and determine that they all wanted electric cars, without any government intervention.

That said, I really do believe we are about to win big on green energy. It could be in fact the biggest ever economic gain experienced on the planet as real energy costs decline rapidly over a couple of decades. These aren't just my thoughts, they are the conclusions of a lot of energy analysts who ponder these things in more detail than I ever can.

FACTBOX: UK electricity prices now most expensive in Europe

You guys are now paying twice as much as we do on electricity.

What happens after you can no longer ship your electronic waste to some impoverished African or Middle Eastern country, to poison their people?

What do you win after your ground water becomes irreversibly contaminated with the Arsenic / Lead / Cadmium / Mercury leached from the panels?

When the Chinese run out of coal and gas, and are no longer able to produce your "green energy", then what?

Similar to the US, the UK doesn't produce bean dip in the way of solar panels, does it?

EV Battery Prices Risk Reversing Downward Trend as Metals Surge

From the article:

Here’s what the early research this year is showing: For the first time since BloombergNEF started its battery price survey back in 2012 — when Toyota was still confident fuel cell vehicles were the future and Elon Musk was yet to be well-acquainted with the Securities and Exchange Commission — battery prices might break away from the year-over-year declines that we’ve become used to. Over the past decade, prices have fallen from almost $1,200 per kilowatt-hour to just $137/kWh in 2020. For an EV with a 50 kWh battery pack, that’s a savings of more than $43,000 in real terms.
If 2021 were to follow the trend, average pack prices this year should be $125/kWh. But over the past 12 months, the price of the key metals used in lithium-ion batteries have risen relentlessly, putting pressure on battery prices.
All in, around 40% of a cell’s cost is tied to commodities that have risen over the past year. Does this rise really matter? Probably not, but there is a chance battery price declines will stall for an extended period of time or could even rise for a few years. If so, then automakers won’t be able to make the same margin on EVs as they do on gas vehicles, and this could lead to a slowdown in EV sales. In regions like Europe, where automakers have to sell EVs or face big fines, this could hit the top line. For the power industry, this will damage the economics of renewables and storage versus coal or gas, which could mean a delay in decarbonizing grids.

24% of the total Lithium-ion cell cost is labor and manufacturing. Set that cost to zero. If the commodity prices go up, then the battery prices follow. The commodity prices are your floor. It doesn't matter what manufacturing or labor costs, or even if that cost is zero, and it can never be less than zero. That's why Tesla has raised the price of its vehicles. They're getting more expensive to manufacture, not less. $102.75/kWh is your floor price for the technology if manufacturing and labor costs are 0, which is twice as expensive is Lead-acid.

95% of all Lead-acid batteries are recycled. Nearly 100% of the Lead recovered is used to make new car batteries.

5% of all Lithium-ion batteries are recycled.

Force the manufacturers to recycle Lithium-ion batteries at the same rate as Lead-acid batteries, instead of dumping them in landfills, watch as the costs instantly triple, and that'll kill off all price decreases in Lithium-ion batteries. You're going to run out of Lithium rather quickly if you don't recycle it, especially if ALL cars sold by 2030 are mandated to use Lithium-ion batteries. Lithium-ion is cheap because it's dumped in landfills and the consumer bears the full cost of the technology through direct purchase and government subsidies, which the consumer foots the bill for, whether they want to or not.

Electric cars: What will happen to all the dead batteries?

Overall, given current battery technology, the entire concept of using massive quantities of batteries to power things that move is just so insufferably stupid that it's hard to know where to begin. The only reason they're able to sell it to anyone is that virtually none of the people buying the technology know the first thing about batteries or electric motors, except for the ideologically-driven marketing hype, which they can regurgitate upon command, and none of them have any slight clue about engineering in general. To top it off, none of the software and electrical engineers designing these things will ever work on them.

We take a complex and energy-intensive device that stores 40 times less energy than gasoline per unit weight, and then expect it to move a very heavy vehicle great distances. That goes about as well as you'd expect. Then we load it up with a bunch of software that any skilled hacker with more spare time than compassion for humanity can completely wreck at the speed of light. What could possibly go wrong? Besides a simple software glitch turning every network-enabled electronic vehicle on the planet into a puddle of molten metal in mere seconds.

The Big Tesla Hack: A hacker gained control over the entire fleet, but fortunately he’s a good guy

Look, mom, it's electric! And now it's been hacked! And now it's a brick! Isn't it great?

They can all become beautiful, shiny, absurdly expensive paperweights, in the literal blink of an eye, all of them at the same time, by design.

For someone so overly-concerned with a silly little vaccine, yet so overly-enamored with these rolling computers, your inability to use your imagination over how this will go wrong is a bit perplexing. As the Chinese government start experimenting with AI, much like novel corona viruses, it's going to be pretty interesting to see where this technology ends up the moment someone in their government wants something from our technology enthusiasts- kinda like their firmware implants into the new 5G technology.

The bottom line is that driving isn't supposed to be a computer game, Louis.

louis · 2021-10-31 14:50:26

You'll see on the Going Solar thread a reference to Power Roll's new thin film PV technology. Everywhere we are seeing significant cost reductions.

The UK's energy price problems large relate to fossil fuels and our stupid policy of only having a tiny amount of storage of gas (compared with our sensible European neighbours who stores months'-worth of gas.

I haven't got much to add re concrete protection for nuclear facilities, except to say that clearly some experts do feel they are vulnerable. And also to add that arches, become fragile when one stone is removed or damaged. The WTC building No 7 was built some 20 years after the main WTC towers. It seems it was thermal expansion (caused by uncontrolled fires) that caused a support to move out of alignment that in turn caused the colllapse. Thermite was not involved it seems.

I don't think you can point to Covid Year as a regular year for battery prices and in any case iron-air batteries don't use lithium. Likewise lithium is not necessary for green hydrogen storage.

Solar plus storage is certainly already winning contracts, but the storage element might only provide a couple of hours' power to augment the direct solar contribution at the moment.

https://renewablesnow.com/news/edfr-sec … ia-752877/

I think you are far too dismissive of the threat of radiation to public health.

As for CCP China, well yes I wouldn't be pursuing this suicidal policy of free trade with them while they steal our technology, corrupt our institutions and plot our demise.

kbd512 wrote:

Louis,
Public health officials are well known for overreacting, no matter the threat. The Soviets were still humans, despite our attempts to de-humanize them, and their public health officials were still medical doctors, which means they were prone to overreacting. We were supposed to have tens of thousands of excess cancer deaths from Chernobyl. That never happened. It never happened because it was a hysteria-based assertion from people who obviously had very little understanding of radiation casualties.
Flight 11 hit the second World Trade Center tower at 466mph. Building 7 collapsed because it was built the same way as the twin towers. It was also set on fire by flaming debris that fell on top of it, which also cut through the fire main system. All buildings that collapsed used the same construction methods. That's why they fell at near freefall speed. The exact same thing happened to that the hi-rise condo building in Brazil that was never hit by an airplane, it was also set ablaze via the central elevator shaft, and also collapsed at near freefall speed. It was a fundamentally horrible design, heavily questioned at the time it was designed (in the words of an architect who resigned over what he saw as the WTC's fatal design flaw- "the WTC tower design flew in the face of everything I was taught about architectural engineering in college"), those doing the questioning resigned or were fired, and they proceeded to build the WTC towers with those flaws anyway, because they were going to "save a lot of money". That was the 1970s. Famously flammable and toxic curtains and upholstery, asbestos insulation, Ford Pinto fuel tanks, Aluminum wiring without proper wiring gauge or insulation, etc. Basically, the commercial world did lots of stupid stuff to save money, and pretty much all of it backfired spectacularly.
A nuclear reactor's containment dome, on the other hand... These structures range in thickness from 2.5 feet to 12 feet thick. The concrete is typically double the density of ordinary concrete in order to stop radiation. They're designed to survive blast overpressures of 50psi or more. No skyscraper in the world can survive that.
An Integral Numerical Analysis of Impact of a Commercial Aircraft on Nuclear Containment
Simulated Aircraft Impact Analysis on Nuclear Power Plants to Global Body of Research
From the article:
Testing containment buildings is nothing new. In 1988, Sandia National Laboratories conducted a strength test on a large concrete block by slamming a fully loaded F-4 Phantom jet directly at it to investigate the survivability of a nuclear power plant in the event of an attack. The jet disintegrated upon impact while the concrete block remained relatively unscathed. The 482mph impact left only a 64mm deep gouge in the 3.66m wide block from an impact force of over 700 G. Subsequent studies concluded that commercial airliners did not pose a danger.
Compared to previous studies in this field, this work goes a step further by analyzing the effect of aging on the impact response of an APR1400 RCB,” said Almuhairi. “With aging, the RCB’s materials degrade, and as a result, the load-bearing capacity could be compromised. In the event of an aircraft impact on an aged RCB, the structural integrity might be lost.”
Three degradation mechanisms were considered in modeling the aging of the containment: liner corrosion, rebar corrosion, and pre-stress loss of tendons.
“The impact an Airbus A320 would have on the RCB for the APR1400 was investigated using finite element analysis,” said Almuhairi. “A new modeling approach was developed to determine the impact pressure of the aircraft, taking into account the change of the aircraft’s cross section during crushing and dividing the impact into three stages.
“We found that the unaged RCB is able to withstand the impact load of an Airbus A320 aircraft without liner or rebar failure for impact velocities as great as 300 m/s,” explained Almuhairi. “While aging the RCB caused the plastic liner and rebar strains to increase, the structural integrity of the RCB was maintained for most cases. Full penetration of the RCB was reported only for the unlikely event of an A320 impacting a highly degraded RCB (where all degradation mechanisms were applied simultaneously) at a velocity of 300m/s, a scenario that is judged very unlikely to occur during the design life of 60 years.”
Results from studies by the Electric Power Research Institute support Almuhairi’s findings: penetrating even weak reinforced concrete requires multiple hits by high speed artillery shells or specially-designed ‘bunker busting’ artillery—both of which are well beyond what intentional human damage methods are likely to cause. Nuclear reactors are more resistant to attacks from large aircraft than virtually any other civil installations, according to the World Nuclear Association, and Almuhairi’s research contributes to this growing body of evidence while providing peace of mind in case of nefarious intent.
300m/s is 671mph
The Russians seem pretty confident that the reactor would not only survive but the containment would still be capable of maintaining its ability to withstand its pressure load limit after such an attack:
CONTAINMENT ULTIMATE PRESSURE CAPACITY WITH CONSIDERATION OF AIRCRAFT IMPACT
We don't make any rocket propellant tanks with squared off end plates, do we?
No, of course we don't.
And why don't we do that, since it would be a lot cheaper and easier to do?
It couldn't be because arches are much stronger, could it?
We have also seen over the last 50 years that increased energy costs lead to increased energy efficiency so that overall cost rise does not reflect unit cost rise. Just about everything is now way more energy efficient than a few decades ago.
Total energy consumption has only ever gone up! Way, way up!
Increased energy efficiency has done zero / zip / zilch / nada / nothing for total energy consumption, period and end of story. That statement is unequivocally true, in absolute terms.
We've continually seen what mass manufacturing can do to reduce costs of products that were previously not mass manufactured, but that's not your claim here.
LED lightbulbs cost more than incandescent lightbulbs, even with mass manufacturing of LEDs. LEDs will always cost more, because the embodied energy is much higher. I would argue, as I'm sure you would, that LEDs are demonstrably "better" at producing light than Tungsten filaments, but no matter what you or I or anyone else asserts, the embodied energy in the materials that go into making LED lightbulbs is much higher than it is for incandescent bulbs.
That is why LEDs cost more than incandescent bulbs. It's not magic. It's not rocket science. It's basic economics. It's the economics of energy expenditure. If the manufacturer is obliged to use more expensive materials to make any product, then you, as the consumer, are also obliged to pay more per unit of product, or else the business goes out of business, and then you no longer have any lightbulbs.
Up to a point, I'm perfectly willing to pay more money for LEDs to save money (energy expenditure, ultimately) on electricity, because over their lifetime, I pay less money and receive more photons, but this paradigm has limitations. A battery that costs as much as a car is not a good deal, though. It's not less expensive than gasoline, unless I deliberately manipulate the price of gasoline to make gasoline more expensive than the battery. If the battery was a good deal, then the government wouldn't subsidize electric vehicles. Consumers would do simple math and determine that they all wanted electric cars, without any government intervention.
That said, I really do believe we are about to win big on green energy. It could be in fact the biggest ever economic gain experienced on the planet as real energy costs decline rapidly over a couple of decades. These aren't just my thoughts, they are the conclusions of a lot of energy analysts who ponder these things in more detail than I ever can.
FACTBOX: UK electricity prices now most expensive in Europe
You guys are now paying twice as much as we do on electricity.
What happens after you can no longer ship your electronic waste to some impoverished African or Middle Eastern country, to poison their people?
What do you win after your ground water becomes irreversibly contaminated with the Arsenic / Lead / Cadmium / Mercury leached from the panels?
When the Chinese run out of coal and gas, and are no longer able to produce your "green energy", then what?
Similar to the US, the UK doesn't produce bean dip in the way of solar panels, does it?
EV Battery Prices Risk Reversing Downward Trend as Metals Surge
From the article:
Here’s what the early research this year is showing: For the first time since BloombergNEF started its battery price survey back in 2012 — when Toyota was still confident fuel cell vehicles were the future and Elon Musk was yet to be well-acquainted with the Securities and Exchange Commission — battery prices might break away from the year-over-year declines that we’ve become used to. Over the past decade, prices have fallen from almost $1,200 per kilowatt-hour to just $137/kWh in 2020. For an EV with a 50 kWh battery pack, that’s a savings of more than $43,000 in real terms.
If 2021 were to follow the trend, average pack prices this year should be $125/kWh. But over the past 12 months, the price of the key metals used in lithium-ion batteries have risen relentlessly, putting pressure on battery prices.
All in, around 40% of a cell’s cost is tied to commodities that have risen over the past year. Does this rise really matter? Probably not, but there is a chance battery price declines will stall for an extended period of time or could even rise for a few years. If so, then automakers won’t be able to make the same margin on EVs as they do on gas vehicles, and this could lead to a slowdown in EV sales. In regions like Europe, where automakers have to sell EVs or face big fines, this could hit the top line. For the power industry, this will damage the economics of renewables and storage versus coal or gas, which could mean a delay in decarbonizing grids.
24% of the total Lithium-ion cell cost is labor and manufacturing. Set that cost to zero. If the commodity prices go up, then the battery prices follow. The commodity prices are your floor. It doesn't matter what manufacturing or labor costs, or even if that cost is zero, and it can never be less than zero. That's why Tesla has raised the price of its vehicles. They're getting more expensive to manufacture, not less. $102.75/kWh is your floor price for the technology if manufacturing and labor costs are 0, which is twice as expensive is Lead-acid.
95% of all Lead-acid batteries are recycled. Nearly 100% of the Lead recovered is used to make new car batteries.
5% of all Lithium-ion batteries are recycled.
Force the manufacturers to recycle Lithium-ion batteries at the same rate as Lead-acid batteries, instead of dumping them in landfills, watch as the costs instantly triple, and that'll kill off all price decreases in Lithium-ion batteries. You're going to run out of Lithium rather quickly if you don't recycle it, especially if ALL cars sold by 2030 are mandated to use Lithium-ion batteries. Lithium-ion is cheap because it's dumped in landfills and the consumer bears the full cost of the technology through direct purchase and government subsidies, which the consumer foots the bill for, whether they want to or not.
Electric cars: What will happen to all the dead batteries?
Overall, given current battery technology, the entire concept of using massive quantities of batteries to power things that move is just so insufferably stupid that it's hard to know where to begin. The only reason they're able to sell it to anyone is that virtually none of the people buying the technology know the first thing about batteries or electric motors, except for the ideologically-driven marketing hype, which they can regurgitate upon command, and none of them have any slight clue about engineering in general. To top it off, none of the software and electrical engineers designing these things will ever work on them.
We take a complex and energy-intensive device that stores 40 times less energy than gasoline per unit weight, and then expect it to move a very heavy vehicle great distances. That goes about as well as you'd expect. Then we load it up with a bunch of software that any skilled hacker with more spare time than compassion for humanity can completely wreck at the speed of light. What could possibly go wrong? Besides a simple software glitch turning every network-enabled electronic vehicle on the planet into a puddle of molten metal in mere seconds.
The Big Tesla Hack: A hacker gained control over the entire fleet, but fortunately he’s a good guy
Look, mom, it's electric! And now it's been hacked! And now it's a brick! Isn't it great?
They can all become beautiful, shiny, absurdly expensive paperweights, in the literal blink of an eye, all of them at the same time, by design.
For someone so overly-concerned with a silly little vaccine, yet so overly-enamored with these rolling computers, your inability to use your imagination over how this will go wrong is a bit perplexing. As the Chinese government start experimenting with AI, much like novel corona viruses, it's going to be pretty interesting to see where this technology ends up the moment someone in their government wants something from our technology enthusiasts- kinda like their firmware implants into the new 5G technology.
The bottom line is that driving isn't supposed to be a computer game, Louis.

SpaceNut · 2021-10-31 16:27:53

Louis, I take it that you are willing to pay twice as much for the thin roll out PV since that's what its going to take.

louis · 2021-10-31 17:23:57

That's not how I read it and installation costs are a large part of the cost of solar.

SpaceNut wrote:

Louis, I take it that you are willing to pay twice as much for the thin roll out PV since that's what its going to take.

louis · 2021-10-31 17:34:33

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sGQAOeSnErs

See at 10:15.

The claim is 45% lower cost of electricity generation compared with rigid solar panels. Given rigid panels can come in at under 2 cents per KwH that is phenomenally low. I think the video implicitly accepts the PV roll might not be suitable for grid scale installations (presumably because of demanding weather conditions, at least on Earth) but it could be a game changer on private houses, industrial buildings and in poorer parts of the world, given you can just, in effect, glue it to a building or other structure. Probably good for EVs as well.

louis wrote:

That's not how I read it and installation costs are a large part of the cost of solar.
SpaceNut wrote:
Louis, I take it that you are willing to pay twice as much for the thin roll out PV since that's what its going to take.

kbd512 · 2021-10-31 18:03:59

Louis,

This is the "Prometheus Fuels" thread, not the "Going Solar" thread. I don't care if we discuss your favorite energy generation technology here, because solar power can certainly be used to produce liquid hydrocarbon fuels, but let's try to relate your power generation tech of choice to how we can create a practical energy production and storage solution. We can use more and more unreliable wind and solar energy, so long as it's backed by a reliable and energy-dense energy storage solution, but we can't have unreliable energy backed by nothing.

At the present time, batteries for grid scale energy storage are non-existent. There are no grid scale batteries of any kind, whether Lead-acid, Lithium-ion, or Iron-air. Lead-acid batteries were vastly cheaper than Lithium-ion for many decades, but nobody ever thought they were practical for storing electrical power at a grid scale. Batteries that supply power for a few hours at most are not grid scale batteries, either. When the sun stops shining, it stops shining for 12+ hours. When the wind stops blowing, it can stop blowing for days. Therefore, there are no grid scale batteries that can cover that kind of power generation outage. The literal handful of grid-connected batteries that smooth over power generation drops from wind and solar are power curve smoothing devices, not grid scale storage. If you want to further discuss batteries or non-existent grid scale storage batteries, then we'll move those posts to the numerous threads about batteries.

If we are seeing significant cost reductions in solar and batteries, then we wouldn't see the prices paid by consumers continuing to go up. The prices keep going up because everything (photovoltaic panels and batteries are included in "everything", just as natural gas and gasoline and Uranium and steel and Aluminum and food are included in "everything") is getting more expensive as the supply of cheap energy from fossil fuels dwindles. When you pay more for energy, the way you "know that you're paying more", is that the price keeps going up, because that's how simple math, also known as "counting", works.

None of the experts who have actually done real testing think the nuclear containment buildings are at risk. I'm taking the word of people with real data, who have run real airplanes into real steel-reinforced concrete, over the word of someone asserting without evidence that he thinks arches are weaker than columns.

Steel reinforced-concrete is nothing at all like a bunch of stones stacked on top of each other. If you bothered to learn something about engineering, then you would know that. The only person stopping you from learning is you. The only thing stopping you from learning is your ideology. The only person who can fix that is you. It's not my problem that you think something without evidence or knowledge of the subject matter. If you wish to post whatever it is that you read, regarding what "some experts think", using a link to their research, then we can discuss this further.

1. I never asserted or claimed that Thermite brought down the WTC towers or Building #7. You can't find that anywhere in what I've written, because I never wrote such an absurd thing.

2. What I said was, "when you wrap steel with pure Aluminum, and it inevitably cracks from external forces applied to it (as in, when it's holding up a building), exposing the interior to greatly accelerated corrosion from contact between dissimilar metals, the chemical products produced from Aluminum touching steel touching water, is better known as Thermite. Thermite is Iron Oxide plus Aluminum Oxide. Those are the corrosion products of Iron and Aluminum alloys. When you attack the grain structure of steel girders holding up the weight of a building, and progressively weaken it over many decades of accelerated corrosion, it's a hell of a lot easier to knock it down with an impact from something massive and moving at great speed, like a commercial airliner.

3. The overriding point is that the combination of the interior columns cracking due to an improper concrete set, which caused excessive corrosion to the steel reinforcement there, and the electrochemical attack on the structural integrity of the outer steel girders that was greatly accelerated by cladding it in Aluminum (the Aluminum cladding was done for sake of vanity- "to make it shimmer like gold in the rising and setting sun"), is what caused the WTC towers and Building #7 to fail.

4. My comment about Thermite was written ONLY to head off the other equally ignorant comments made by people who know nothing of engineering or chemistry, with respect to the assertions that Thermite or explosives somehow brought down the buildings.

5. The WTC towers and Building #7 were brought down by inexcusably poor design combined with lack of proper maintenance, plain and simple. The building owners were told that both WTC towers, Building #7, and some other buildings at that site were within a few years of being condemned by the City of New York, due to their severe structural integrity issues and improper or non-existent fire suppression systems.

Regarding my dismissal of the threat of radiation to public health, that must be your position, not mine. The power generation technologies you like so much, are the very same ones that release the most radioactive materials into the environment. All nuclear power operations and accidents have not released as much radiation into the environment as burning coal to make wind turbines and solar panels, or mining the materials used in solar panels and wind turbines and batteries.

It's also very telling that you have no answer to the threat posed by hackers or AI, but take no issue with making everyone 100% dependent upon electronics technologies that can easily be taken over and/or totally destroyed by hackers or governments weaponizing AI.

kbd512 · 2021-10-31 18:06:53

Louis,

Let's relate the cost of solar power to the production of hydrocarbon fuels. There are plenty of threads that you created where you have touted the low cost of solar panels, so tie that back to what Prometheus Fuels is doing.

louis · 2021-11-01 17:21:45

I think you are redefining "grid scale" to mean "total grid scale". Grid scale as I understand it has always meant operating at an energy level that is relevant to keep a grid going rather than an individual household, factory or even local community. There's no doubt in my mind that lithium batteries are being deployed at a grid scale in South Australia for instance, to keep the whole grid going at crucial points. Even if the power output is only 1% say, that's still a very large power output in relation to households, factories and communities.

Saying that batteries that help keep a grid going in the evening are not "grid scale" is like saying gas generators are not grid scale. It's meaningless. Of course they are grid scale, because they are operating at a scale designed to maintain the grid.

I'm happy to discuss "Reverse Combustion" only here. It is annoying when threads go off-topic. Always happens to mine!

I have already welcomed this technology as a positive development. If it is low pollution as well, as you have pointed out, then it's really a very beneficial form of storage.

I do feel ultimately very positive about other storage technologies like iron-air, green hydrogen, pumped storage and so on but they can be discussed elsewhere.

kbd512 wrote:

Louis,
This is the "Prometheus Fuels" thread, not the "Going Solar" thread. I don't care if we discuss your favorite energy generation technology here, because solar power can certainly be used to produce liquid hydrocarbon fuels, but let's try to relate your power generation tech of choice to how we can create a practical energy production and storage solution. We can use more and more unreliable wind and solar energy, so long as it's backed by a reliable and energy-dense energy storage solution, but we can't have unreliable energy backed by nothing.
At the present time, batteries for grid scale energy storage are non-existent. There are no grid scale batteries of any kind, whether Lead-acid, Lithium-ion, or Iron-air. Lead-acid batteries were vastly cheaper than Lithium-ion for many decades, but nobody ever thought they were practical for storing electrical power at a grid scale. Batteries that supply power for a few hours at most are not grid scale batteries, either. When the sun stops shining, it stops shining for 12+ hours. When the wind stops blowing, it can stop blowing for days. Therefore, there are no grid scale batteries that can cover that kind of power generation outage. The literal handful of grid-connected batteries that smooth over power generation drops from wind and solar are power curve smoothing devices, not grid scale storage. If you want to further discuss batteries or non-existent grid scale storage batteries, then we'll move those posts to the numerous threads about batteries.
If we are seeing significant cost reductions in solar and batteries, then we wouldn't see the prices paid by consumers continuing to go up. The prices keep going up because everything (photovoltaic panels and batteries are included in "everything", just as natural gas and gasoline and Uranium and steel and Aluminum and food are included in "everything") is getting more expensive as the supply of cheap energy from fossil fuels dwindles. When you pay more for energy, the way you "know that you're paying more", is that the price keeps going up, because that's how simple math, also known as "counting", works.
None of the experts who have actually done real testing think the nuclear containment buildings are at risk. I'm taking the word of people with real data, who have run real airplanes into real steel-reinforced concrete, over the word of someone asserting without evidence that he thinks arches are weaker than columns.
Steel reinforced-concrete is nothing at all like a bunch of stones stacked on top of each other. If you bothered to learn something about engineering, then you would know that. The only person stopping you from learning is you. The only thing stopping you from learning is your ideology. The only person who can fix that is you. It's not my problem that you think something without evidence or knowledge of the subject matter. If you wish to post whatever it is that you read, regarding what "some experts think", using a link to their research, then we can discuss this further.
1. I never asserted or claimed that Thermite brought down the WTC towers or Building #7. You can't find that anywhere in what I've written, because I never wrote such an absurd thing.
2. What I said was, "when you wrap steel with pure Aluminum, and it inevitably cracks from external forces applied to it (as in, when it's holding up a building), exposing the interior to greatly accelerated corrosion from contact between dissimilar metals, the chemical products produced from Aluminum touching steel touching water, is better known as Thermite. Thermite is Iron Oxide plus Aluminum Oxide. Those are the corrosion products of Iron and Aluminum alloys. When you attack the grain structure of steel girders holding up the weight of a building, and progressively weaken it over many decades of accelerated corrosion, it's a hell of a lot easier to knock it down with an impact from something massive and moving at great speed, like a commercial airliner.
3. The overriding point is that the combination of the interior columns cracking due to an improper concrete set, which caused excessive corrosion to the steel reinforcement there, and the electrochemical attack on the structural integrity of the outer steel girders that was greatly accelerated by cladding it in Aluminum (the Aluminum cladding was done for sake of vanity- "to make it shimmer like gold in the rising and setting sun"), is what caused the WTC towers and Building #7 to fail.
4. My comment about Thermite was written ONLY to head off the other equally ignorant comments made by people who know nothing of engineering or chemistry, with respect to the assertions that Thermite or explosives somehow brought down the buildings.
5. The WTC towers and Building #7 were brought down by inexcusably poor design combined with lack of proper maintenance, plain and simple. The building owners were told that both WTC towers, Building #7, and some other buildings at that site were within a few years of being condemned by the City of New York, due to their severe structural integrity issues and improper or non-existent fire suppression systems.
Regarding my dismissal of the threat of radiation to public health, that must be your position, not mine. The power generation technologies you like so much, are the very same ones that release the most radioactive materials into the environment. All nuclear power operations and accidents have not released as much radiation into the environment as burning coal to make wind turbines and solar panels, or mining the materials used in solar panels and wind turbines and batteries.
It's also very telling that you have no answer to the threat posed by hackers or AI, but take no issue with making everyone 100% dependent upon electronics technologies that can easily be taken over and/or totally destroyed by hackers or governments weaponizing AI.

kbd512 · 2021-11-01 18:24:23

Louis,

louis wrote:

I think you are redefining "grid scale" to mean "total grid scale". Grid scale as I understand it has always meant operating at an energy level that is relevant to keep a grid going rather than an individual household, factory or even local community. There's no doubt in my mind that lithium batteries are being deployed at a grid scale in South Australia for instance, to keep the whole grid going at crucial points. Even if the power output is only 1% say, that's still a very large power output in relation to households, factories and communities.

Provide a link to a battery electrical energy storage system that provides sunset-to-sunrise electrical power for a city of a million people. That's your baseline. America has 400 million people. Whatever the battery solution for 1 million people looks like, we have to scale that up by at least a factor of 400. That assumes we don't go whole-hog on these battery electronic vehicles. If we do that, then we will need more than two orders of magnitude more electric generating and/or storage capacity to prevent a mere 5% of the nation's motor vehicle owners from collapsing the entire grid, from coast-to-coast, when a mere 5% decided to "fast charge" their battery electronic vehicles.

If 5% of motor vehicle owners are BEV owners, and all 5% of them decide to fast charge their passenger vehicles, that is more than the sum total electric generating capacity of the entire US electrical grid (all of them) at any given moment, which includes coal / gas / geothermal / hydroelectric / nuclear / solar / wind / everything else.

Simply find a battery of any description that provides sunset-to-sunrise residential electrical power for at least a million people. If you can't find a city, then find a computer data center that consumes a similar amount of electrical power, or an industrial manufacturing plant. I will accept any of the above as proof that a battery is providing grid scale electrical power. A power curve smoothing battery that provides 30 minutes to 2 hours of power while a gas turbine fires up, is not a grid scale battery electrical energy storage system.

louis wrote:

Saying that batteries that help keep a grid going in the evening are not "grid scale" is like saying gas generators are not grid scale. It's meaningless. Of course they are grid scale, because they are operating at a scale designed to maintain the grid.

The only reason the batteries are required to help keep the grid going is that we now have so much unreliable wind and solar power that the grid would collapse at least once per day without power curve smoothing or massive over-capacity provided by gas turbines, in order to deal with the enormous power fluctuations produced by wind and solar power. We didn't need any batteries when the grid was powered by coal / gas / nuclear.

louis wrote:

I'm happy to discuss "Reverse Combustion" only here. It is annoying when threads go off-topic. Always happens to mine!

We always go off-topic. I was only looking for something that relates back to reverse combustion. Provide a link to a battery that's doing what we need it to do at the required scale, and then we can talk about batteries instead of hydrocarbon fuels. I don't care where the conversation ends up. There's nothing wrong with discussing batteries in a thread about combustion engines. It's when someone starts asserting that a battery is equivalent to a combustion engine that I take issue with that. Both technologies are objectively not like-kind replacements.

If you or anyone else asserts that we can run a diesel fueled forklift inside a sealed indoor factory warehouse with a bunch of people working in there as well, then I would take equal issue with that, because it's an absurdity.

louis wrote:

I have already welcomed this technology as a positive development. If it is low pollution as well, as you have pointed out, then it's really a very beneficial form of storage.
I do feel ultimately very positive about other storage technologies like iron-air, green hydrogen, pumped storage and so on but they can be discussed elsewhere.

I'm looking for a single data point that demonstrates grid scale power. If the Iron-air battery works at scale, then great, that's money, let's use it. Show me a working implementation somewhere. That's all I'm asking for. 30 minutes of power isn't proving that a battery can power a grid over 12 hours of darkness. If someone is doing that, then great, but show me the money.

louis · 2021-11-01 19:22:43

You're asking for things I haven't said we have yet!

What I have said is that we certainly have ways of increasing the green energy perecentage of energy usage in various ways.

The next five years are going to be crucial and I think we will see huge changes in storage technology.

While I was initially sceptical about hydrogen storage, I am coming round to thinking that might well provide the fastest route to a reliable green energy system. The basic technology of electrolysis is very simple and reading various analysts, it appears like the scope for cost reduction is huge.

We shall see but currently my money is on hydrogen storage being the game changer.

kbd512 wrote:

Louis,
louis wrote:
I think you are redefining "grid scale" to mean "total grid scale". Grid scale as I understand it has always meant operating at an energy level that is relevant to keep a grid going rather than an individual household, factory or even local community. There's no doubt in my mind that lithium batteries are being deployed at a grid scale in South Australia for instance, to keep the whole grid going at crucial points. Even if the power output is only 1% say, that's still a very large power output in relation to households, factories and communities.
Provide a link to a battery electrical energy storage system that provides sunset-to-sunrise electrical power for a city of a million people. That's your baseline. America has 400 million people. Whatever the battery solution for 1 million people looks like, we have to scale that up by at least a factor of 400. That assumes we don't go whole-hog on these battery electronic vehicles. If we do that, then we will need more than two orders of magnitude more electric generating and/or storage capacity to prevent a mere 5% of the nation's motor vehicle owners from collapsing the entire grid, from coast-to-coast, when a mere 5% decided to "fast charge" their battery electronic vehicles.
If 5% of motor vehicle owners are BEV owners, and all 5% of them decide to fast charge their passenger vehicles, that is more than the sum total electric generating capacity of the entire US electrical grid (all of them) at any given moment, which includes coal / gas / geothermal / hydroelectric / nuclear / solar / wind / everything else.
Simply find a battery of any description that provides sunset-to-sunrise residential electrical power for at least a million people. If you can't find a city, then find a computer data center that consumes a similar amount of electrical power, or an industrial manufacturing plant. I will accept any of the above as proof that a battery is providing grid scale electrical power. A power curve smoothing battery that provides 30 minutes to 2 hours of power while a gas turbine fires up, is not a grid scale battery electrical energy storage system.
louis wrote:
Saying that batteries that help keep a grid going in the evening are not "grid scale" is like saying gas generators are not grid scale. It's meaningless. Of course they are grid scale, because they are operating at a scale designed to maintain the grid.
The only reason the batteries are required to help keep the grid going is that we now have so much unreliable wind and solar power that the grid would collapse at least once per day without power curve smoothing or massive over-capacity provided by gas turbines, in order to deal with the enormous power fluctuations produced by wind and solar power. We didn't need any batteries when the grid was powered by coal / gas / nuclear.
louis wrote:
I'm happy to discuss "Reverse Combustion" only here. It is annoying when threads go off-topic. Always happens to mine!
We always go off-topic. I was only looking for something that relates back to reverse combustion. Provide a link to a battery that's doing what we need it to do at the required scale, and then we can talk about batteries instead of hydrocarbon fuels. I don't care where the conversation ends up. There's nothing wrong with discussing batteries in a thread about combustion engines. It's when someone starts asserting that a battery is equivalent to a combustion engine that I take issue with that. Both technologies are objectively not like-kind replacements.
If you or anyone else asserts that we can run a diesel fueled forklift inside a sealed indoor factory warehouse with a bunch of people working in there as well, then I would take equal issue with that, because it's an absurdity.
louis wrote:
I have already welcomed this technology as a positive development. If it is low pollution as well, as you have pointed out, then it's really a very beneficial form of storage.
I do feel ultimately very positive about other storage technologies like iron-air, green hydrogen, pumped storage and so on but they can be discussed elsewhere.
I'm looking for a single data point that demonstrates grid scale power. If the Iron-air battery works at scale, then great, that's money, let's use it. Show me a working implementation somewhere. That's all I'm asking for. 30 minutes of power isn't proving that a battery can power a grid over 12 hours of darkness. If someone is doing that, then great, but show me the money.

SpaceNut · 2021-11-01 20:09:08

hHere is the Australian battery http://newmars.com/forums/viewtopic.php?id=8267

kbd512 · 2021-11-02 14:39:38

Louis,

I thought the same thing 20 years ago. Over time, my excitement has been tempered by historical reality. Historical reality says there are vanishingly few "game changing" technologies. 20 years later, batteries are still 40 times less energy-dense than hydrocarbon fuels. I know I sound like a broken record, but orders of magnitude have meaning. You can't power a heavy duty truck or a ship or an aircraft in a practical way, using an energy storage medium that's 10 times less energy dense than liquid hydrocarbon fuels. The universe is trying to tell us something, but some people refuse to accept the message because they don't like what it means.

The message thus far, is as follows:

Oxidation chemical reactions involving Hydrogen produce at least 1 order of magnitude more energy output per unit weight of fuel than any electrochemical reaction that we have successfully tested in a lab to date.

We've been doing chemistry and electrochemistry experiments for a lot longer than I've been alive. We have allocated supercomputers and AI programs capable of computational chemistry, to solving the battery problem. Thus far, we have very little to show for all of the effort. We have lots of interesting results, but no dramatic technological improvements. Sooner or later, we need to accept that gasoline is useful due to it's dramatic energy density improvement over batteries.

13,000Wh/kg (gasoline) vs 300Wh/kg (best commercial Lithium-ion batteries)
33,600Wh/kg (gasoline) vs 600Wh/kg (projected solid state Lithium-ion batteries- "next 5 years")

Even if we actually double that figure for batteries in the next 5 years, batteries can't hold a candle to gasoline, never mind Hydrogen, in the volumetric and gravimetric energy density departments. We have a slightly less utterly impractical battery at that point.

I'm a lot less skeptical of Hydrogen energy storage than batteries for grid scale operations and heavy vehicles.

Current batteries are 1/2 of a heavy duty truck cargo load for equivalent range.
Projected batteries are 1/4 of a heavy duty truck cargo load for equivalent range.

There's an upper weight limit on all existing roads. We're not about to re-surface every road in America because battery trucks weigh more than the road can support, especially when Hydrogen trucks and trains can weigh LESS than existing machines.

Nobody will buy more trucks that are double the cost and there aren't enough truck drivers, as-is.

All I want is a practical solution for similar cost to what we have now. If it's a little more or a little less, no big deal. A 10% cost increase is not the end of the world. Double the price or more is a serious problem.

You keep telling me about how costs are being reduced, but none of that is reflected in the prices consumers pay. In short, something doesn't add up here. Technologies that actually cost less don't wind up more expensive for the consumer. If they do, then no matter how theoretically cheap they are or should be, they're actually more expensive for the person footing the bill. The working class and the poor can't afford yet another considerably more expensive solution to their existing transportation and basic necessity problems.

I don't care what word games you try to play with the fact that a Tesla Model 3 is more than double the cost of a Mazda 3. It's a more expensive car with less range and adding up all the gasoline and engine maintenance, the Tesla Model 3 is still no less expensive to operate over time, as compared to the Mazda 3. Since most Americans never keep a car for more than 3 years, let alone longer, whatever perceived economic benefits having lower cost fuel bills brings with it will never be seen by the original owner. That assumes they don't raise the price of electricity sky-high to cover revenues not generated from gasoline taxes.

Will Chinese battery electronic cars change that paradigm? Perhaps, but that remains to be seen.

SpaceNut · 2021-11-02 18:41:25

The auto fuels and even hydrogen are not carrying the mass of the oxidizers and that is where the battery gets penalized as its got both with in the chemistry.

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