New Mars Forums

Void,

Apart from the fact that more CO2 absolutely will increase warming, the extent to which further increases in atmospheric CO2 levels will increase temperature appears to be greatly exaggerated for ideological reasons.  If there's no "global crisis", then there's no funding for the people studying it.  The political left of the western world created an entire industry built around terrifying their religious faithful over the weather.  They ran out of real issues to fight against.  Our stocks of true racists and dictators have largely been depleted.  The number will never be actual zero, but virtually all of the racism was a product of leftism, assuming you accept that radical leftists want dictatorship (maximal government control over individuals) and radical rightists want anarchy (maximal individual freedom).  All the traditional humanity-centric issues the left historically championed have been accepted as normative by the majority of society, with the possible exception of transgenderism, simply because it forces people to play a game of pretend which is obviously false.  I suppose the climate change religion a kind of genius, but not the kind that will ever unite people in common cause.  There is no such thing as a large over-arching problem that leads to broad consensus and cooperation.

The people peddling thermodynamic runaway are doomsday cultists, plain and simple.  Their mindset is no different at all from the people who build bunkers, collect dozens of guns, and buy buckets of freeze dried food.  Whereas the "guns and butter" doomsday preppers only spend their own money on such things, our doomsday scientologists spend everybody else's money pursuing their wildly contorted interpretation of reality.  I'm okay with people spending as much of their own money on their apocalypse fantasies as they can afford, but if they want to spend my money, I draw that line at thermodynamic impossibility.  We can spend money on nukes so that nuking us means whomever launches also gets nuked.  Whether that's totally nuts or not, it's worked for 75+ years.  Everyone who has nukes seems to understand why you have them but never willingly use them.  We can maintain a conventional military to deter foreign invasion of America and our allies, although I think our military spending is already beyond what is reasonable and necessary.  We've accumulated too many techno-gadgets, but training and raw numbers have been neglected in absurd ways.  We've spent far too much on capabilities that we don't require.  Wars between roughly equal peers are won or lost on the basis of local numerical superiority and firepower, and they always have been.  We should maintain basic social safety net programs to ensure that our people don't starve in the streets when they get old or injured.  We shall not use public money to meddle in the internal politics of other nations, nor to spread any kind of ideology, regardless of intent or tenets.  We shall not use public money for political purposes.  We shall not use public money to make rich people richer.

For starters, a thermal runaway is a thermodynamic impossibility.  If such a thing were ever possible, then it would've happened long ago, and there would be no life on Earth as a result.  Since that clearly never happened, even when atmospheric CO2 levels were as high as 8,000ppm, these cultists have no argument with a scientific basis.  More to the point, the universe as it exists today would never have existed.  Any thermodynamic forcing function that don't have an associated negative feedback loop is destined to result in a thermal runaway, and since no part of the observable universe operates that way, we can safely conclude that such a runaway process is impossible in a far less extreme environments found on Earth.  Venus is so hot because it's 50% closer to the Sun and its sea level atmospheric pressure is 93X greater than Earth.  If the entire Venusian atmosphere was Nitrogen vs CO2, but surface atmospheric pressure was still 93X greater than it is here on Earth, then the surface temperatures would be almost as hot as they are with nearly pure CO2.

How do I know for a fact that a thermal runaway is impossible?:
Temperature-Pressure Profiles for Solar System Planets with Thick Atmospheres

The Venusian atmosphere is nearly pure CO2.  At the same atmospheric pressure of 1bar (Earth sea level), temperature rise on Venus is 50K, or 90F.  That's the temperature rise on Venus at 1bar of atmospheric pressure and a nearly-pure CO2 atmosphere, given an average TSI value of 2,601.3W/m^2 for Venus at Top-of-Atmosphere (ToA) vs 1,361W/m^2 for Earth at ToA.  If you notice, the temperature-pressure profiles for all planets look remarkably similar, despite having very different atmospheric compositions.  Proximity to the Sun is the greatest determining factor of temperature at 1bar of pressure.  If Earth's atmospheric composition was the same as it is for Venus, in which case no Oxygen-breathing animals would survive, then we would expect a maximum surface temperature rise of 47F purely attributable to a CO2 atmosphere.  We also have liquid water oceans that change the surface albedo.  Earth utterly lacks enough Carbon to produce that much CO2, so I won't lose any sleep over this.

What actually "controls" Earth's cimate?

Earth's distance from the Sun, quite obviously.  1.9X great solar insolation increases average surface temperature from 57F to 440F.

The politicians and activists are opportunists of the worst variety- people who prey upon the ignorance of the average person to coerce them into buying pointless things to "solve" a problem they have no hope of solving, first because they have no way of even measuring the results of the purported solutions, second because their solutions never actually replace what we presently use for energy.  This is downright silly to anyone who is not a member of the death cult.  That behavior is what lead people such as myself to initially discount that the effect was even real.  Josh changed my thinking on this after pointing me in the right direction.  The warming effect of CO2 is quite real, but so small that the warming which has already taken place represents the lion's share of all the warming that will take place without radical changes in atmospheric composition and pressure.  Any solution which does not remove nearly all of the atmospheric CO2 produced since the Industrial Revolution is rather pointless.

In actual practice, climate change's most significant effect on human life today, and over the foreseeable future, is to serve as a political identity issue to unite leftists who would otherwise have nothing in common with each other, and would otherwise start fighting each other for power, just as they already are.  It's an issue intended to put a bunch of misfits on the same team, in order to "fight the right".  If you take away their climate change issue, there's really no other issue most of them agree on.

Right now we see them burning down EVs and EV dealerships here in America.  That astronaut fella from Arizona, Mark Whatshisname (sorry, genuinely can't remember, because he's not very important, but he or his brother spent a year in space aboard ISS), sold his Tesla and bought a giant diesel powered truck.  He made a big deal about it by posting it to anti-social media.  He doesn't give a crap about climate change and never did.  Like the vast majority of leftists, Mark is a rapacious liar who will never tell you what he actually thinks, because he mostly doesn't.  That's a sad thing to say about someone who holds a PhD, but it would seem that neither intellectual accomplishment nor experience equates to honesty, because honesty requires morality, and leftism has no values it actually adheres to, beyond "follow the other lemmings".  His group-think is handed down to him from on-high and he doesn't question it, because independent thought signals the death knell of group-think.  They're going to mandate that everyone buys an EV, but it's not going to come from the world's largest and only economically successful EV company.  Every other traditional car company has lost many billions on EVs, to the point that all the major car makers are pushing for more affordable alternatives to pure EVs, which they cannot make at scale for anything approaching the price of a gasoline powered car.

The political left in this country used to be dominated by free thinkers who questioned everything, which is the only reason why we discovered that climate change could be a potential problem to begin with.  Their boundless creativity was how our nation grew to become what it is today.  Unfortunately, after political power was consolidated they quit trying to win intellectual arguments using logic and facts, which was previously the metric that demonstrated to the world which ideas were "closest to being correct".  They descended into "might makes right" (the garden variety bullying the political left is so famous for) as their power base became dominant across academia, media, culture, and politics.  The political right only wants to be left to their own devices, which now represents a serious threat to the orthodox group think of the radical elements of the left.  Anyone who questions the agenda is treated the exact same way the Catholic Church treated blasphemers.  The people who used to question everything now question very little.  The political right is forced to think through their positions to a far greater degree than the political left, if only for self-preservation from the violence that the left is equally famous for.  The left now believes things on the basis of political association.  It's an inversion of historical norms.  Group association is a terrible reason to think or believe anything.

If you're wondering why this issue animates me so much, it's because I don't really belong to the political right or left, but I'm just as much of a misfit as the people on the left.  The only reason I'm not on the left is my abject refusal to imbibe in group-think.  I grew up admiring the intellectuals on the left, but they abandoned intellectualism.  I can't be a classical liberal / independent because I think their beliefs about most contentious issues are every bit as childish as what the left has become.  For the most part, these independents are leftists who are irked by the lack of thought coming from the political left.  Much like the atheist left, they cannot agree to adhere to a moral code.  I would be fine with something as simple as, "It's never okay to screw people over who merely disagree with you, so treat others the way you wish to be treated".  As an atheist myself, I don't feel the need to incessantly attack religion or religious people because I have accepted their reasoning, even when I disagree with it.  That's always bothered me.  I can't fathom how you can be a true atheist yet imbibe in the same behavior as the religious do.

As best I can tell, that is how and why our political establishment has perverted science to serve a political cause.

Dr Clark,

Antonov AN-225's wing area was 905m^2 and wing tank fuel capacity was 375m^3.

Concorde's wing area was 358m^2 and internal fuel capacity was 119.5m^3.

For Starship to have 1,800m^2 of wing area, the wing's fuel capacity would be at least 600m^3, which is a third of Starship's present propellant capacity.  Since 304L stainless is such a weak structural metal relative to its mass, the wing would need to carry propellant and be shaped to resist both internal pressurization loads and aero loads lower in the atmosphere.  This proposal would increase the weight of Starship to impractical levels, which is why it won't be done.  A lifting body Starship, which may or may not remain within tolerable mass limits, would require a complete redesign to provide 1,800m^2 of lifting surface area.

tahanson43206,

If you find a refractory metal alloy that matches the coefficient of thermal expansion of Graphite by the time it reaches 3,000K, please let me know, because that would be very interesting to me.  Until then, I'm going to presume that we're not using metal since the only metals I'm aware of with melting points at or above the target temperature are Niobium, Molybdenum, Tantalum, Rhenium, and Tungsten.  None of those metals have CTEs close to Graphite and none of them transfer heat as well as Graphite.

Edit:
Since you're fixated on using metal, how about a 90% Tungsten 10% Copper alloy, which will still melt near 3,400C / 3,673K?

That alloy is at least weldable and formable without too much difficulty, and is noted for good thermal fatigue properties.  The materials cost alone will be around half million dollars for 1,200kg of material or so ($400/kg).

Take a look at how far the yield strength figures drop by the time you reach the temperature range we're operating at:
Yield strength of Tungsten and some of its high strength alloys

25ksi is all you're going to get at 3,000K, as the chart above shows.  It's better than the 6.5ksi of fine grain synthetic Graphite, but I have no idea what the creep characteristics of that alloy will be, nor how it will perform with hot flowing Hydrogen.  We can use the same aerospace coatings to try to slow the rate of embrittlement, but that's about it.

Edit #2:
In case you're wondering, I chose W-Cu alloy based upon its low CTE and higher than average resistance to Hydrogen embrittlement, but I don't have data for 3,000K.  As with all other metals, it's almost silly putty at 3,000K, relative to room temperature, but the only other alloys capable of surviving at the temperatures in question are even more expensive than W-Cu alloy and there's not much data about their Hydrogen embrittlement resistance in the temperature range we're interested in.  I think Niobium alloys are the only other type that might be suitable, but I don't know much about them because they're very exotic stuff.  Maybe NASA has some data on them.  Niobium alloys have been used in uncooled rocket engine nozzles during the Apollo Program.  The LEM's main engine, for example, was made from a Niobium alloy of some kind.

tahanson43206,

Resisting pressure from the hot expanding Hydrogen gas was borne solely by the mechanical strength of the Graphite fuel rod assemblies.  Please think about why that must be the case.  If the Hydrogen gas is not being forced through those tubes, and whatever pressure increase inside said Graphite tubes is not being resisted by the mechanical strength of those tubes, then where the heck is the Hydrogen supposed to go to absorb and remove the heat produced by the reactor?

The reactor pressure vessel was made from Inconel for reasons related to manufacturability of a complete reactor core.  There was no such thing as 3D printing in the 1960s.  They used a welded Inconel shell and regenerative cooling of the metallic components to prevent them from melting during engine operation.  We don't need to do that, because we're not building a nuclear reactor core with multiple discreet components that must be made from different materials due to their intrinsic nuclear properties.

The test results are already in.  NERVA's Graphite fuel rod assemblies did not rupture inside the core, despite being internally pressurized with hot flowing hydrogen well above the pressures we want to use.  To assert that the Inconel pressure vessel "supported" those fuel bundles is to misunderstand what "support" actually meant.  The shell supported the weight of the entire reactor assembly on the ground and during vehicle acceleration into orbit, and it kept all of its many components "fastened together", specifically because it had to built with discreet components.

A reactor core cannot easily be fabricated as a monolithic device.  Even if it could, a 3D printer to sinter a functional reactor core together did not exist back then.  The major engineering problem was and is surface erosion of the Graphite Hydrogen coolant channels from the hot flowing Hydrogen.  I prefer to spend my time learning about solutions to the actual engineering problems the design and test program encountered, and that was the major problem encountered while operating the reactor.  The test program did not encounter major mechanical strength deficiencies with the Graphite fuel rod assemblies, despite being non-homogeneous because they had to contain Uranium fuel particles and it had to contain the resultant fission products and survive extreme neutron bombardment and it had hot Hydrogen flowing through them.

To appease your concerns over the ultimate mechanical strength of sintered pure Graphite, how about wrapping the interior and exterior surfaces with a Carbon fiber tape / tow sintered into the surface using Graphite powder in a vacuum furnace?

The material described above is better known as Reinforced Carbon-Carbon (RCC).  You may recall that NASA recently built a non-regeneratively cooled LOX/LH2 engine with a main combustion chamber and nozzle from this material.  I posted several documents about it, and the chamber pressure was drastically higher than those we're contemplating using.  It's very light, very strong, did not rupture, and repeatedly fired for far longer than RS-25 without any refurbishment.  The primary problem they had with it, once again, was erosion of the internal walls from the extreme heat and corrosive combustion products.  The solution to that problem, once again, was Zirconium Carbide or Hafnium Carbide surface coatings.

Pure Carbon fiber has a sublimation point every bit as high as Graphite (Carbon)... because Carbon fiber is... wait for it... Carbon.  If we need a fiber with "more stretchiness" and more strength to really really "overkill" this heretofore undiagnosed tensile strength problem, then we can use CNT fiber.  Heck, we could even mix Graphene flakes into the sintered Graphite powder and then we don't need to deal with the complications of fiber over-wraps.  Any of those materials are available for nominal additional cost, because the percentage weight required to impart substantial additional strength is very low.

Therefore, my answer to any theoretical Graphite strength deficiencies, which were not encountered during actual test firing of a nuclear thermal rocket engine, is to address them by using different forms of Carbon with higher tensile strengths.

More succinctly:

1. We can afford to have a larger expansion nozzle that pulls double duty as our heat input surface area for the sunlight to shine on.  We don't have any reactor core mass, length, or radioactivity complications (control rods, fuel and moderator rods, coolant channels to cool the Inconel pressure vessel and Beryllium reflector) to account for.  This allows us to achieve higher temperatures within our pure Graphite "engine".  The overall weight is less than a reactor.  The length of the nozzle could be as long as a complete nuclear thermal engine happens to be for equal power output, and it would make no difference to how difficult it was to transport or deploy the device.

Since we opted for pure Graphite construction, we don't need regenerative cooling.  A solar thermal engine doesn't have a reactor pressure vessel, throat, and chamber made from Inconel, nor a giant reflector made from Beryllium, which must be kept cool since those metals all melt at much lower temperatures than Graphite.  Inside a nuclear thermal rocket engine the Hydrogen propellant is most definitely confined within the propellant flow passages drilled through the Graphite fuel rods, so that base material absolutely is strong enough to withstand the pressures, because it has to be, else said Hydrogen gas expansion through the propellant flow passages ruptures those Graphite fuel rods and destroys the nuclear rocket engine.  We will be applying less pressure, less stress, and to a homogeneous Graphite material, at virtually the same temperatures reached by the hottest parts of the nuclear thermal rocket engine core.  The real difference is that our heat application won't be nearly as non-uniform as it is inside a nuclear thermal engine.

2. We benefit from using a very circuitous internal Hydrogen flow path for the propellant to make contact with, to uniformly absorb the externally applied heating from the Sun.  Again, this means we don't have temperature gradients quite as high as a nuclear thermal engine.  Some of the peripheral fuel pins in the nuclear thermal engine could be 500K+ cooler than the fuel pins in the center of the core, with the end result that much hotter and cooler gas mixes together ahead of the engine's throat after it exits the fueled portion of the reactor core, which is where that "significant heat loss" comes from, which I spoke of.

3. We can achieve a higher expansion ratio, which further improves Isp, because we have this monolithic "hollow" Graphite channel wall nozzle / engine structure.  The length of said nozzle is somewhat less critical when there is no nuclear reactor core positioned ahead of the nozzle.  NERVA XE Prime was 6.9m in length and was to use a mechanically extendable uncooled nozzle extension made from Carbon.  Since our engine uses external surface heating only, we can transform our engine into a "giant nozzle" 6.9m long, and we've given up nothing to the original NERVA design in terms of overall engine length.

4. Our solution will be heavier because it uses fiber optics and/or mirrors to collect photons from the Sun, but in terms of cost and the difficulty of working with the materials, nothing we're doing or working with are government-controlled / furnished materials or classified.  Maybe the Hafnium Carbide is a government-restricted aerospace material, but if so we can fall back on Zirconium Carbide.  Mylar, Graphite, fiber optics, and such do not even qualify as restricted items.  There will be some trade secrets and Uncle Sam will declare that the engine is ITAR-restricted if it receives any government funding, but that's about it.  The composite Hydrogen propellant tanks qualify as ITAR-restricted rocketry tech.

5. In terms of cost, I've little doubt that a solar thermal engine will be far less costly than a nuclear thermal engine, thus more attainable if we pursue this technology.  We assert that the primary reason for continued development of nuclear thermal engines is the Isp benefit that nuclear thermal can achieve.  We can achieve the same or slightly superior Isp using direct solar heating, and there will be fewer objections to the launch.  There's nothing truly remarkable about the materials or fuels being used here.  It's all very standard stuff that is mass-produced here in America and elsewhere.  Foreign allied customers can benefit from the ability to place very heavy satellites in high orbits and send less mass-constrained space probes wherever they so choose, because the mass and cost associated with doing so is half that of the best LOX/LH2 engines.  Heavier propellants such as Methane or Ammonia or CO2, which are easier to store and generate more thrust, can be used to achieve Isp figures similar to more complex LOX/LCH4 or LOX/LH2 bi-propellant chemical rocket engines.  The solar collector size and thrust generated can be tailored to desired specifications.  We're starting with either a 1,000kgf or 2,000kgf engine because that is sufficient to send a truly massive interplanetary transport vehicle on its way, in about a month.

tahanson43206,

1. Flow rate is dependent upon temperature, pressure, and thermal power input into the propellant (a 1,000MWth engine is going to flow more propellant than a 100MWth engine, so if temp / pressure / throat area / expansion ratio are all proportional, we would expect 10X greater propellant flow rate).

2. Engine data for a real engine (XE Prime) and proposed engine for flight testing (Alpha) appears below:
NERVA XE Prime
Core power output: 1,137MWth
Weight (complete engine): 18,144kg
Thrust (vac): 246,663N
Isp (vac): 841s
Hydrogen flow rate: 32.7kg/s (full output)
Core temp 2,270K (full output)
Chamber pressure: 593.1psi

NERVA Alpha (first flight-ready engine design, never built)
Core power output: 367MWth
Weight (complete engine): 2,550kg
Thrust (vac): 72,975N
Isp (vac): 875s
Hydrogen flow rate: 15kg/s (full output); 95.5kg/s (startup); 15kg/s (shutdown)
Core temp 2,880K (full output); 60K temp reduction to provide 2 full hours of operation without excessive fuel loss from erosion
Chamber pressure: not provided
Thermal stress limit: 83K/s (max heating rate ramp-up to prevent thermal over-stress of the Graphite fuel rods)

This document contains Hydrogen mass flow rate, heat transfer surface area, inlet velocity, outlet velocity, and fuel assembly length data:
Idaho National Laboratory - Scoping Analysis of Nuclear Rocket Reactor Cores Using Ceramic Fuel Plates - January 2020

H2 inlet velocity is 100m/s (at 400K), outlet velocity is 800m/s (at 2,800K), the fuel assembly length is 80cm, as found on Page 49.

Check out how radically Hydrogen's thermal conductivity increases between 400K and 3,000K on Page 50 of the above document.

I bet that AI program isn't accounting for Hydrogen thermal conductivity increase as temperature increases, pressure, and surface area of the propellant channel.  In any event, this detail level data only reinforces the idea that what I proposed doing with the engine geometry will work, and whatever that AI program is telling us about needing a 1.4km long flow channel to provide the necessary residence time is an error based upon some very simplistic assumptions about geometry and flow that don't come close to approximating a real engine design.

tahanson43206,

Thermal Hydraulics Design and Analysis Methodology for a Solid-Core Nuclear Thermal Rocket Engine Thrust Chamber

Edits:

Affordable Development and Demonstration of a Small Nuclear Thermal Rocket (NTR) Engine and Stage: How Small is Big Enough?

Non-Uniform Heating Impact on Specific Impulse in Nuclear Thermal Propulsion Engines

Nuclear Reactors - Spacecraft Propulsion, Research Reactors, and Reactor Analysis Topics

Mechanical properties of molded graphite-modulus and strength

Scientists successful in 3D printing complex graphite parts with 97% purity

In our meeting, I asked about the idea that a very large / high expansion ratio "channel wall nozzle", 3D printed in Carbon / Graphite, with an enormous amount of internal surface area and volume for heating of the Hydrogen propellant, could provide sufficient residence time to allow the Hydrogen propellant to achieve 3,000K:

An incredible variety of internal heat transfer tube configurations are possible, if they prove beneficial:

NERVA Fuel Element Diagram:

Proposed NVTR Fuel Element Diagram:

GW,

My opinion is that we will use induced turbulent flow to do a better job of transferring the heat into the Hydrogen.  Maybe we don't even need a porous graphite core as such, for a flow rate of only 1 to 2kg/s, and a hollow channel wall cylinder design will work better.  If we need more channel wall surface area for super heating or extended residence time in the engine, then we can use our large 100:1 expansion ratio nozzle as part of our heat exchange surface area.  This will keep the engine as light as possible.

I won't pretend to know what the optimal approach is, so I'm not ruling out any particular approach unless it results in impractical component sizes, performance requirements, or costs.  The major parts of the propulsion system have to be transportable to orbit in a Starship, or they're not very practical.  As far as materials are concerned, we have the materials of the NERVA Program (Graphite structure with Zirconium Carbide cladding) which are known to work, as well as newer materials (Hafnium Carbide cladding) known to work even better.

Electrostatic energy storage devices, which we know as "super capacitors", are an example of a long-lived electrical / electronic form of energy storage.  Those devices can achieve 1M+ cycles with little loss of storage capacity, relative to electro-chemical batteries.  If we can figure out how to get their energy density on-par with Lead-acid batteries while reducing manufacturing cost, perhaps with mass production, then I see a future which uses them as durable solid state electrical energy storage devices that provide us with our future mass electrical energy storage for data centers and computers.  Super capacitors are typically based upon Carbon and plastic materials, which are reasonably plentiful.  Graphene-based lab-scale super capacitors have achieved 50Wh/kg to 80Wh/kg.

As modern computers become increasingly photonic vs electronic, and photonic chips consume many times less electrical energy for a given compute capability, then these advance super capacitor devices can store the energy required to ensure that sophisticated AI-enabled super computing infrastructure continues to operate, even if the grid is less than totally stable, or worse, has to shrink because we cannot devote the personnel and logistical support to these "mega project" compute devices.

Computers are not going anywhere.  They're here to stay.  We do need to arrest the growth of power consumption associated with large data centers and AI, but then we need to power them through a combination power buffer / fast energy storage that precisely regulates voltage and enables them to continue operating, uninterrupted.

Calliban,

We have commercialized 700bar tanks that withstand 25,000 pressure cycles.  The use of stronger fibers and matrices could enable us to develop 1,000bar tanks.  A 1,000 bar storage tank's energy density, even when combined with hot water, should match that of actual Lithium-ion battery packs, which are much heavier than the cells themselves.  It's close enough to Lithium-ion that there ought not be much of an argument against compressed air.

A 700bar 350L CFRP H2 storage tank weighs 211kg.  This is commercialized tech.

Source:
NPROXX 350L 700 bar Hydrogen Tank

From Wikipedia:

I presume 0.3MJ per 1m^3 of air compressed to 200bar means 1.05MJ per 1m^3 at 700bar and 1.5MJ per 1m^3 at 1,000bar.

A 350L / 700bar tanks should then store 257.25MJ of energy, or 71,458Wh.
A 350L / 1,000bar tank should then store 525MJ of energy, or 145,833Wh.

If we further assert that only 70% of that potential energy can provide useful power input to an air turbine and flywheel, then we have 50kWh and 102kWh compressed air "batteries" that never lose capacity.

Making composite gas storage tanks requires a lot less materials and energy than Lithium-ion batteries, and those tanks can store compressed air, Hydrogen, Methane, or Propane in a vessel that meets US DoT standards for compressed gas storage.  There is no electro-chemical battery I'm aware of that will retain 100% of its original storage capacity over 25,000 cycles, and the inability of electro-chemistry to completely reverse the chemical processes that take place during charge and discharge virtually ensures that there never will be.

We have plenty of places along our coastlines where we can sink trompes into the ocean floor to compress air to between 400 and 600psi without having to dump a lot of waste heat from that initial compression, at which time further compressing that supply air, to between 700 and 1,000bar, generates a more manageable quantity of waste heat, which can be converted to hot water just below its boiling point, whereupon compressed air and hot water pipelines can deliver those products to gas stations.  Tanker cars could also deliver the energy, and use the same energy to power themselves.

It's an elegantly simple solution to a complex energy storage and distribution problem, so that the average person who only drives 50 to 100 miles per day, or less, has a very inexpensive way to get to work.  Since such cars don't need complex control systems, a guy with a few hand tools can work on the car.

Let me put this in even simpler terms that maybe everyone can understand.

What happens to the rest of the global economy if the US collapses under the weight of all the debt we're accumulating through this toxic combination of massive trade deficits, insane money printing that's not backed by organic economic growth which would warrant increasing the M1 money supply, spending policies that are counter-productive at best, and unsustainable entitlements?

The problem isn't the taxes.  We're already taxed to death.  The problem is that our government keeps spending money it doesn't have by writing an ever-growing stack of IOUs, which we cannot possibly pay.  Their spending policies make the rich ever-richer and the poor ever-poorer.  Rather than investing in the local economy, most of the rich people find every possible way to send our money and jobs overseas.  We're not stupid, we know quite well what they're doing to us, but since they can and do buy off our politicians from both parties to formulate policies intended to relegate the rest of us to serfdom, we could not find anyone at all to represent our interests until President Trump was elected.

If American citizens spent their personal money like the US federal government spends everyone's money:

The Biden administration's addition to the US debt (the equivalent of 2 centuries worth of debt in only 4 years):

These people never met a dollar they didn't want to spend, and their pens are writing cheques we can't cash:

Defense spending vs every other form of government spending:

The interest on debt payments is 11% of the entire federal budget.

Spending on defense and every other discretionary program is 13% of the entire federal budget.

Spending on entitlements is now 68% of the entire federal budget.

We could cut defense spending to zero and it would have no effect whatsoever on our government's spending problem.  They'd make absolutely certain that all of the defense spending was both retained and even increased by the very next day, it would merely go to some other idiotic idea.

How much do you figure other countries will be able to sell to Americans who can no longer afford to pay for necessities and a government that's either defaulting on its debt or making its currency even more worthless than it already is?

Who else are you going to start trading with, and why not do that right now?

If the Russians or Chinese decide they want a piece of your country for themselves, who is going to stop them?

Everyone else is talking a good game about defense spending while not actually making the required investements into their own defense.

In many western nations, the local population is aging out.  It's becoming an old folks home.  Old folks are not going to drive consumption-led organic economic growth.

If America collapses, then what?

What's your end game?

RobertDyck,

The Fulcrum - Business Democracy -  Just the Facts: Canadian Tariffs

Let's carry this trade imbalance forward for a decade...  $600B is an enormous amount of money.  Persistent trade deficits drain the wealth and jobs out of an economy, which is precisely what has been done to working class Americans, and we're tired of it.

The Fulcrum - Governance and Legislation - Trump's Trade Deficit

To reiterate, we're sick of the wealth being drained out of America to prop up the economies of other nations.  10 trillion dollars over 10 years is equivalent to 40% of our nation's entire annual GDP, for every 10 years we keep participating in this insanity.  The entire US GDP is 25 to 28 trillion dollars per year.  That problem will not be solved by continuing to do what we've always done, so we're trying something different.

As I explained to you before, with regards to the motor vehicle issue, shipping cars and parts, hundreds or even thousands of miles, when they could be made locally just as easily, is one of the reasons why we burn so much fuel every year.  Shipping tens of millions of cars half-way around the world was and is a dumb idea.  Shipping heavier but much lower value goods like pig Iron is an even dumber idea, but right now we're doing that as well.  Fuel is not so cheap and plentiful anymore, specifically because we've done things like that for decades.  It's either time to acknowledge the limits of our energy resources, or it's time to build massive hydrocarbon fuel synthesis plants so that fuel is as cheap and plentiful as it was back in the 1960s.