The world is going to change this is remarkable

[Olumin]

Just think of the debates that one would have...

I can see it now: "The Future Technologies Thread"
226 pages in two weeks

 

[bykfixer]

I can see it now: "The Future Technologies Thread"
226 pages in two weeks

And that's just Chillin' and oldfashionedleddude.

 

[JustAnOldFashionedLEDGuy]

And that's just Chillin' and oldfashionedleddude.

I am quite done with "Chillin" thank you.

 

[chillinn]

And that's just Chillin' and oldfashionedleddude.

Duty calls.

Links are tricky? What? Links are only "tricky" if you don't read what they link to which is pretty obvious at this point that you are just parroting what others have said and can't think / understand for yourself, and if you think that is an ad-hom, feel free to think that. You have been shown now to be wasting everyone's time now.

Let me see if I can help you out. From the link I provided above:

It calls for expenditures of 71.6 billion dollars in the fiscal year 1952--a total 78 percent above expenditures for the year which ended last June 30.

Let the 1951 fiscal year DoE budget expenditures be x:

1.78x = $71.6B
x = $40.2B
So the actual DoE budget for the 1951 fiscal year was $40.2B

So DoE spent $40.2B in 1951. Does that help?

Insanely expensive? That is about 250 half decently paid professionals, fully burdened salaries, for one year. I gave people regional sales budgets higher than that and single customer sales budgets as well. Again, you are showing you don't have a clue.

In the big R&D scheme of things, that is dirt cheap.

$5M+ in 1951 is dirt cheap? $1 in 1951 is equivalent in purchasing power to about $11.45 today, so that $5.2M in 1951 is $59.5M today. For 400kW!! Roughly $13/Wh in 1951 or $150/Wh today, putting the average family home monthly electric bill at $11,518 in 1951 or $132,000 today, and that's just to break even on the $5.2M EBH-I venture. That isn't dirt cheap. That most certainly is insanely expensive.

Fission is naturally occurring. I guess based on your logic, fission power research was free. Oy vey, talk about mental gymnastics.


pulled out of a body part. I will leave that up to readers to guess which body part.

This is the fallacy known as false analogy. Fission is naturally occurring, but to get any electricity out of it is crazy expensive. Not so with sunlight, but there is always some up front cost. Today they actually sell 400kW systems in kits. Near as I can tell, 400kW would cost upwards of $800K. Or about $69K if it were possible to purchase in 1951 dollars, or about 0.013% of that "dirt cheap" $5.2M EBH-I. There's that 1% again.

again, talking out of another body part. In the last 25 years, the efficiency of the primary cell type used, crystalline and poly-crystalline cells has only improved a small amount, about 25-30%, and not much in the last 15 year. As systems have gotten larger, the actual system level efficiency increase has been even less. Cost down yes mainly due to Asian MFG, but efficiency no. Multi-junction cells took a leap, but they only work at extremely high solar irradiation levels and require large concentrators to work.

Here's a little table I whipped up showing how efficient PV was when, from data here:
year PV efficiency
1954 6%
1958 9%
1959 10%
1960 14%
1985 20%
1994 30%
2006 40%
2007 42.8%
2019 47.1%

I can do something you are apparently incapable of, which is admit I was mistaken. No one is perfect. Doubling of PV efficiency is not consistent, 6 years from 6% to 14%, 26 years from 10% to 20%, 21 years from 20% to 40%. Today PV is closing in on 50% efficiency. What has massively increased in the last 20 years, and exponentially so, is solar energy adoption. And that's not really because anyone cares about Climate Change. It's because PV is profitable for everyone involved.

We are currently paying a lot of taxes to the most expensive generation ever, roof top residential solar, all that over priced, stuff from the 2010's which essentially just shipped money off shore. The money on that outstrips the R&D on Nuclear in the US by a large amount but you just guess at things so don't know that.

Nuclear is dead, Three Mile Island killed it, and it has been going through its death throws for the last 40 years, that's why there's no massive annual government investment in nuclear power anymore, other than President Biden recently signing a bill to spend $8B on keeping them running. Trillions of dollars were poured into nuclear development spanning 4 decades from the 1940s to the 1980s. Nuclear never got less expensive, not remotely so. It was a terrible investment, except for the fact that we got more bomb fuel out of it than we knew what to do with, apparently.

Renewable subsidies have increased in the last 20 years, and are only now on the order of single digit billions per year. Any idea how many chunks of $5B-$8B are in just $1T? More than a few, I assure you. And double digit trillions were sunk into nuclear up to the 1980's, and we're still paying $6B/yr just to deal with the waste from the Manhattan Project alone, and half a billion dollars more to just not do anything about the waste from nuclear power, just to let it sit on site at every nuclear power plant (which btw has been at capacity at every site for decades), and that annual cost will effectively never go away, and in fact it will only increase due to the steady march of inflation.

Between 1967 and 1972, the 48 reactors that were completed before the Three Mile Island accident in 1979 began construction. Their OCC [Overnight Construction Cost] rise from a range of $600–$900/kW to approximately $1800–$2500/kW.

That sucks. Residential solar energy costs on average 6 to 8 cents per kWh and is even cheaper on an industrial scale.

Here, this is where you copied your poor estimate, "A 400W solar panel receiving 4.5 peak sun hours per day can produce 1.8 kWh of electricity per day, as we found in the example above. Now we can multiply 1.8 kWh by 30 days to find that the average solar panel can produce 54 kWh of electricity per month."

This is not remotely the case though. 4.5 peak sun hours is assuming perfectly south facing, perfect angle, no losses, yearly average. That is rarely if ever the case for buildings, especially after all losses. If you get 75% of that, you are doing very well.

Ooops, we are up to 97 / 0.75 = 130. Of course, that is yearly average. Do you really think the average house can support 97 - 400 watt panels, or 130? Typical 400W panel is 21 square feet. 130 * 21 = 28,000 square feet. I am doing pretty well for myself, but my house is not going to support 28,000 square feet of panels. Try that on an apartment building/condo, or even town/row houses.

Oh, and in December, you need 50% more, and you need 5-6 days of storage. Where will they put the batteries, what is the costs, maintenance, cost of the space, disposal costs, etc?


1/4 the amount huh? .... nope, because it would all be peak production now, so the cost would decrease less, and it would be required in the worst possible moments, raising cost.

Remember what you claimed was a call to authority, me quoting actual power engineers who need to deliver electricity? Well it is quite obvious you are not one of them.

Nitpicking over tiny details here, just saying. Even in your nightmare worst case scenario a PV installation will crush electric bills. 75% of 50% is still 37.5%. So cutting your electric bill by 37.5% is nothing? It's 75 bucks off a $200 bill. Who here wouldn't want that?

So you really think solar PV is a waste of the investment in its development, and nuclear is a good investment. Really. The fallacy here that you've employed all along is called the invincible ignorance fallacy, aka argument by pigheadedness. No matter how clean, cheap, profitable and efficient solar is, you will get tripped up in minutia blinding you from seeing how risky the US investment in nuclear was to begin with, fail to understand that it never broke even and never could, that it never made economic sense and never, never ever will, and it is still digging its own economic hole, and will continue to do so long, long after the last nuclear power plant has been decommissioned and cleaned up. In a word, nuclear power is a disaster. So it's a good thing for us you're not in charge, or we'd all be broke and in massive debt, forever, including you.

Have yourself a day. Sorry, CPF!! The best intentions put me here. I should have known. Mea culpa.

 

[orbital]

+

chillinn, solar is a supplement only,
coming from someone who's invested plenty at my residence in solar equipment.

*I'll bet we'll only have 4~5 days of sun this month, this month..*

We need to consistently turn turbines daily, without interruption, to produce electricity.
yes, I'm 100% in favor of new fission construction.

 

[Olumin]

Fusion could be a very promising technology for spacecraft propulsion. Far more efficient & less volatile then chemical rockets (meaning far safer). At the same time it can also act as a spacecrafts primary power plant. Of cause a spaceship already carries a bunch of water, so using some in a closed loop turbine system for power generation would be easy enough to do. With that kind of power you could even run a electromagnetic deflector for radiation shielding, which saves a lot of weight. Most of the waste heat would be thrown out the back so the rest can probably be easily dealt with using a few radiators.

 

[chillinn]

yes, I'm 100% in favor of new fission construction.

Make it profitable, and you can have all the new nuke plants you want. Economics is the only hurdle for nuclear power.

 

[Chauncey Gardiner]

...Nuclear is dead, Three Mile Island killed it, and it has been going through its death throws for the last 40 years, that's why there's no massive annual government investment in nuclear power anymore, other than President Biden recently signing a bill to spend $8B on keeping them running. Trillions of dollars were poured into nuclear development spanning 4 decades from the 1940s to the 1980s. Nuclear never got less expensive, not remotely so. It was a terrible investment, except for the fact that we got more bomb fuel out of it than we knew what to do with, apparently.

Not in Japan - https://www.npr.org/2022/12/22/1144990722/japan-nuclear-power-change-fukushima

 

[JustAnOldFashionedLEDGuy]

+

chillinn, solar is a supplement only,
coming from someone who's invested plenty at my residence in solar equipment.

*I'll bet we'll only have 4~5 days of sun this month, this month..*

We need to consistently turn turbines daily, without interruption, to produce electricity.
yes, I'm 100% in favor of new fission construction.

Chillin only deals in theoreticals. He only takes into account practical details like the lights turning on when you hit the switch, when it suits his argument

 

[orbital]

+

Let's calculate the amount of electricity needed to charge 10,000* EVs' in an average city every day
(not including electric buses, trucks, warehouse equipment, delivery vehicles ect................................................ ................................(


*275,913,237 vehicles currently registered in US

 

[chillinn]

Not in Japan - https://www.npr.org/2022/12/22/1144990722/japan-nuclear-power-change-fukushima

Nuclear power is not profitable anywhere, and never has been. But Japan actually cares about meeting its obligations under the Paris climate accord, which requires that up to 22% of its power be generated by nuclear. Japan, however, has money to burn. $100B here, a $100B there, pretty soon you're talking about real money.

If anyone could make nuclear power profitable no one could stop the ensuing wave of nuclear power plants being built. There would be one in every county in the US. The reason there isn't is that it takes investors to drum up $10B before the first watt of electricity can be generated, and no one is dumb enough to invest in something that mathematically can not make money. Make nuclear turn a profit. How hard could it be? That's all that needs to happen, and nuke plants would be everywhere. We could use them to suck carbon out of the atmosphere and environmentally control the actual atmosphere as Earth's air conditioning, so it's not like it would be a bad thing. The problem, again, is merely the economics. Either we figure it out or we suck it up.

Chillin only deals in theoreticals. He only takes into account practical details like the lights turning on when you hit the switch, when it suits his argument

Theoretically, by the symptoms you've exhibited here, you're mentally ill with malignant narcissism. Likely this was caused either by being abused as a child, being doted on by a parent that taught you that you could do no wrong, or by success. Famous actors get it. Star quarterbacks get it. Captains of industry get it, Presidents get it. There is no shame in it unless you allow yourself to succumb to the most insidious symptom, namely, denial. Get help. It's never too late. It can be mitigated or cured in under 2 years just sitting and talking to a professional twice a month for a half an hour. It's easy, There's nothing easier than learning about yourself and how to be a human being. Don't do it for me, of course, do it for the people you care about that undoubtedly you can't help yourself but to denigrate in a feeble attempt to mask your deep anxieties. Do it for them, because they don't deserve your abuse. As for me, whatever you can dish out, it's nothing to me, because I am a lot tougher than any narcissist. Narcissists are bullies. Bullies are cowards.

+

Let's calculate the amount of electricity needed to charge 10,000* EVs' in an average city every day
(not including electric buses, trucks, warehouse equipment, delivery vehicles ect................................................ ................................(


*275,913,237 vehicles currently registered in US

Supply and demand. I suppose it is possible that electricity will become so scarce, and demand so high, that in your apocalyptic EV future nuclear power becomes profitable at some point. I just think it is unlikely, mostly due to the far cheaper and more profitable energy alternatives.

 

[idleprocess]

chillinn, solar is a supplement only,
coming from someone who's invested plenty at my residence in solar equipment.

*I'll bet we'll only have 4~5 days of sun this month, this month..*

We need to consistently turn turbines daily, without interruption, to produce electricity.
yes, I'm 100% in favor of new fission construction.

The idea of the fully energy-independent home seems to work best in an offgrid setting where the cost of running utilities is prohibitive and the desire for isolation aligns with making compromises on the structure's energy budget.

In you region I don't doubt that running the economy primarily on solar is not viable using present COTS technology - too little sun would necessitate overprovision of solar as well as presently-available battery arrays whose function is less load-following and more frequency stabilization.

In places like sunny Texas in time with some R&D thrown into improved concentrated solar power and flow batteries a large percentage of the economy could be run on solar power. Concentrated solar (ideally the parabolic trough flavor rather than death ray power tower) can store heat energy to smooth out power delivery for days. Flow batteries connected to solar (or any form of generation) can buffer output over an entire season using bulk liquids (anolyte and catholyte) without the hazard, cost, and short operating lifespans of lithium chemistries.

Not in Japan - https://www.npr.org/2022/12/22/1144990722/japan-nuclear-power-change-fukushima

The easy part will be to reactivate furloughed plants - the cost of the work to restart will be peanuts relative to the sunk costs. Starting on new plants will be expensive in terms of mere economic - and far trickier - political capital. I suspect that energy security is more dear to Japan than many other nations - recent events really driving home this point - thus they may accept greater cost for the certainty.

Let's calculate the amount of electricity needed to charge 10,000* EVs' in an average city every day
(not including buses, trucks, warehouse equipment, delivery vehicles ect................................................ ................................(


*even more, 10 years from now

Why is this such a concern? The grid silently absorbs new megalomarts, the uptake of heat pumps for industrial process heat, pool pumps, air conditioning compressors, resistance heating, dozens of can lights running PAR lamps on dimmers, and electric patio heaters left on all night without worry. It can handle any realistic pace of EV uptake at the macro level without anyone outside the industry really noticing.

At the micro level there will be adjustments. Some homes - especially in temperate regions with few 240V appliances - may require panel or service upgrades. It was with some disappointment last year that I watched the local grid operator replace the 50kVA pad-mound transformer serving 5 homes on my street with ... a 50kVA transformer - seemed a bit shortsighted on their part; if everyone on my street suddenly gets a couple of EVs and replaces their gas furnaces with electric heat pumps said transformer might not have enough Wheaties.

 

[alpg88]

So basically more coal, gas, oil will need to be burned to make extra electricity, for clean cars and clean heat at home, lol.

 

[idleprocess]

So basically more coal, gas, oil will need to be burned to make extra electricity, for clean cars and clean heat at home, lol.

Beneficial to trade millions of point sources distributed among the population for fewer concentrated sources that are usually not in population centers, more efficient, with better pollution controls. Net energy consumption is markedly reduced as well.

 

[orbital]

..Why is this such a concern? The grid silently absorbs new megalomarts, the uptake of heat pumps for industrial process heat, pool pumps, air conditioning compressors, resistance heating, dozens of can lights running PAR lamps on dimmers, and electric patio heaters left on all night without worry. It can handle any realistic pace of EV uptake at the macro level without anyone outside the industry really noticing.

At the micro level there will be adjustments. Some homes - especially in temperate regions with few 240V appliances - may require panel or service upgrades. It was with some disappointment last year that I watched the local grid operator replace the 50kVA pad-mound transformer serving 5 homes on my street with ... a 50kVA transformer - seemed a bit shortsighted on their part; if everyone on my street suddenly gets a couple of EVs and replaces their gas furnaces with electric heat pumps said transformer might not have enough Wheaties.

+

Just pointing out the need for consistent grid flow, that's it.

 

[alpg88]

Beneficial to trade millions of point sources distributed among the population for fewer concentrated sources that are usually not in population centers, more efficient, with better pollution controls. Net energy consumption is markedly reduced as well.

True, but it has as many drawbacks as benefits, power failure and black outs leave you cold and immobile. now you can store gasoline in your garage, shed for your car, /generators, and oil in the tank for furnace.
With a "clean new world" a power failure (lets say a long one in the winter, due to storm knocking down power lines, and repair not able to get there for a while), you have no heat and your vehicle can not be charged. no power generators, not to mention it does not reduce our dependence on fossil fuels.

 

[idleprocess]

True, but it has as many drawbacks as benefits, power failure and black outs leave you cold and immobile. now you can store gasoline in your garage, shed for your car, /generators, and oil in the tank for furnace.

Just about everyone that lost power in the 2021 TX blackout also lost heat despite residential gas systems generally remaining online. That storm motivated me to get a minimal backup generator setup that can manage WFH (Work From Home) as well as conveniences like the refrigerator and the furnace since short term the TX grid isn't apt to be made any more reliable.

With a "clean new world" a power failure (lets say a long one in the winter, due to storm knocking down power lines, and repair not able to get there for a while), you have no heat and your vehicle can not be charged. no power generators

In this same scenario the roads are likely impassible and gas stations aren't getting deliveries. Blackouts can also jeopardize communications meaning no plastic transactions - and even if you've got cash they still might not be able to make sales such is the nature of POS systems these days.

During the Texas storm of 2021 the demand crunch ahead of time combined with the roads being impassable for days meant that many gas stations ran dry anyway.

General advice on EVs is to plug in when parked at home - cheaper than public charging and start the next day on full; not too far separated from the general idea that you should refill your ICE vehicle around ¼ since contingencies happen.

not to mention it does not reduce our dependence on fossil fuels.

Wind has been more than 20% of Texas electrical generation for many years now which means a substantial reduction in fossil fuel usage. Yes these are intermittent sources but there are adequate thermal plants in the state; CC gas plants can spin/throttle up the turbine section quickly and peaking plants are even faster to spin up. CC gas plants' responsiveness has done more to retire coal plants than any .gov mandate. Solar faceplate capacity is a reasonable fraction of wind but obviously its capacity factor is less - but that's still a reasonable reduction in fossil fuel consumption during the day.

 

[Olumin]

Fusion will be a handy way for us to get helium. Since helium supplies on earth are limited and we are running out, artificial fusion is one of the only ways to restock our supply. Besides for filling party balloons, helium is used in a lot of important science & industry. More of a neat side effect then anything else but worth mentioning.

The alternative would be to get it from space. Ironically helium is the 2nd most common substance in the universe, but not in inner solar systems, as most of it gets blown away by solar winds early on. We only have a bunch of hydrogen because it is bound in water, hydrogen by itself escapes quickly. The outer planets are quite rich in helium.

 

[Olumin]

Also quite ironically, large quantities of helium may be necessary as cryogenic coolant for some fusion reactor designs. Go figure.

 

[hsa]

They use it to cool MRI machines too. We need it.