Obama could kill fossil fuels overnight with a nuclear dash for thorium
- Thread starter vallorn
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This is almost to good to be true. I've seen false promise though, ones saying they could end the energy crysis, but this seems in a realm of possiblity and even though I don't agree with Brack Obama on a lot of things, I do trust him enough to try and make this a reality. There will be investores who will take this up and thus ending the shady oil companys who now plauge this world. A small and compact energy that is abundent will only lead the human race fruther it would only be foolish and selfish to try and stand in the way of this.
Nothing is this good without a downside. There must be an issue with thorium other than the fact it could irritate the existing nuclear industry.
Maybe I'm just cynical.
EDIT: Or is the problem that thorium isn't viable for nuclear weapons, so governments would rather keep using a nuclear industry that can keep their stockpile up on the side?
Maybe I'm just cynical.
EDIT: Or is the problem that thorium isn't viable for nuclear weapons, so governments would rather keep using a nuclear industry that can keep their stockpile up on the side?
Yes I would bet.vallorn said:
Lets go to the Tesla Roadster for an example. The Tesla Roadster uses around 6,800 lithium Ion cells for energy storage. The battery pack must charge at a fairly hazardous 70 amps @ 240VAC, and even then it takes nearly four hours to charge and will net approximately 230 miles per charge. So great if you live in a city, decent if you're right outside one, horrible if like me you drive a lot.
The battery pack has a very stiff $36,000 price tag attached to it. Batteries which require a cooling system because of the high chance of catastrophic failure of the cells due extremely rapid charge and discharge these batteries are subjected to, anyone who has had a laptop battery burst on them can tell you it's not fun (the cells used are nearly identical to those used in laptops).
That's not even getting into the lifespan of these batteries. Tesla estimates that with care the batteries should last roughly 100,000 miles of travel or 7 years, or roughly 1/3 of the life expectancy of a current internal combustion engine in a vehicle. Even lower standard vehicles are expected to last to around 200,000 miles these days. In practice (the Prius uses a smaller nickel metal hydride battery pack that does have its own set of problems, but still compares) consumers have a hard time properly charging their batteries and the cells subjected to abuse begin to fail early. Telsa promises to have this problem worked out due to the arrangement of their cells which is supposed to take the strain off failing cells in the system, but only time will tell if this is true or not. Take the laptops for example even with some conditioning circuitry built into them how many people are able to care for their battery and not see it fail to hold more then a 10-15 minute charge after one year of use?
I did mention that the batter pack alone can cost double what some people pay for their cars right?
The fact is that right now a battery that as a weight to capacity ratio high enough, and a lifespan long enough to see more then niche usage in vehicles does not exist. Even if it did you are delusional to think that any battery system can hold up under a charge that would allow those batteries to be charge quick enough that charging would be as convenient as stopping in for fuel.
Yes, the success of the Prius and other cars like them are going to be felt shortly anyway as nearly 1.1 million battery packs sold in hybrids between 2000-2005 start to fail enmass and have to be disposed of, hazardous chemicals and all. Now imagine all 400 million vehicles replaced with a battery pack of sufficient size to provide adequate travel to those vehicles. What a nightmare, especially when lithium may have already reached peak production, with roughly 60% of what is left likely located in one place in South America.
Sorry buddy but if the answers where that easy it would already be done.
why are you blaming Capitalism? its Monopolies, Vested Interests and Nuke hungry Governments that keep this from being made.Alandoril said:
i worked out a profitable system where cars have removable battery units and are charged at gas stations. these charged cells are then swapped with non charged cells to refuel thus removing the need for home charging equipment and long charge times.manaman said:
i would upload i diagram which explains it better but i dont know how...
Cars (since people for some reason have something against electric cars) and chemical production.vallorn said:
In fact, not a single drop of oil goes to powering the U.S.
The thread title makes it sound like it's trying to kill oil. Which isn't true since it wouldn't even effect oil.Halceon said:
Doesn't matter, that just means both titles are misleading. This would have exactly a 0% effect on oil.vallorn said:
What fuel station in their right mind would face the possibility of exchanging nearly depleted cells for brand new cells?vallorn said:
What customer is willing to face the surprise of only getting half the travel distance they just got with their battery pack in their brand new vehicle?
Do you realize just how much the battery packs weigh?
Even if they used modular battery packs to facilitate different sized vehicles and slightly ease the removal of the already substantially heavy batteries they would run into issues where the more depleted packs would draw down and prevent the less depleted packs from charging fully in the vehicle. The more depleted packs would reach capacity and a higher voltage quicker increasing the overall voltage of the packs, lowering the charging current to the rest of batteries, eventually casing the voltage to reach the charge voltage while the good cells would have had little chance to take a full charge. This would only decrease the life of the packs, and substantially impact total travel distance.
How do you stop those customers that abuse the system by depleting the battery pack through use at home then heading over to a fueling station when the pack has less then 50% capacity and getting a different battery to do the same thing with? Do you remove the home charging option? Seems pretty lousy to be forced into a battery swap program. What if you then move to an area that is only supplied by competing stations?
Then you have battery downtime to consider. Every moment that the battery spends in a fueling station costs that station money. Li-ion battery packs have a limited shelf life because the same process that causes them to deplete during charging causes them to deplete just sitting there, at a much slower rate to be sure, but they still have a limited shelf life. Not the best scenario for Bump-In-The-Road, Middle-of-Nowhere stations, where the batteries could potentially sit for a quarter of their life.
This still doesn't even address all the other concerns, the disposal of waste battery packs, the relative scarcity of lithium that will quickly become apparent if we try to replace all 500,000,000 cars on the road today with electric cars, the weight to capacity ratios, and all the others brought up and ignored in the post you quoted.
In case you are wondering Li-ion batteries deplete (lose capacity) because deposits are formed in the electrolyte with each charge-discharge cycle. Improperly charging the battery, over charging especially can speed up this process, but discharging the battery beyond recommended amounts will also speed up the process. These deposits serve to increase the internal resistance of the battery which lowers the current capacity of the battery. The high temperatures the battery can reach during rapid charging and discharging are by far the most problematic as these temperatures rapidly increase the rate at which these deposits form.
No offense but I am not sure you have enough knowledge of batteries and charging systems to properly work the major bugs out of a system like that, I would be interested in seeing the diagram however, but I am not sure why you can't describe the process since you stated you worked out the process.
...powering an electric motor. An electric car doesn't need Li-ion batteries. The Hydrogen acts as a disposable battery for that car.manaman said:
Then by your description a car powered by a gas generator that runs an electric motor would be a true electric car?crimson5pheonix said:
The fuel cell consumes fuel to generate energy within the vehicle. Not a pure electric car, closer to a hybrid then a true electric car.
Yes and no. Mostly no. The difference being that the gasoline motor is still an internal combustion engine. The Hydrogen car doesn't burn anything. The act of the Hydrogen combining with the Oxygen emits an electron. In a way, the Hydrogen acts as a battery. An inefficient battery when compared to Li-ion it may be, but it doesn't have nearly as many of the drawbacks.manaman said: