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More Nuclear, Coal or Natural gas power?
- Thread starter ZZman
- Start date
OVERKILL
$100 Site Donor 2021
No.
The conditions were anticipated, that's why TEPCO was implored to both relocate the backup generators from sea level in front of the plant, to behind it, and to upgrade the seawall to a height that matched the newer plants, a decision which had been made based on updated data on tsunami height predictions.
However, due to Japanese nuclear regulation being run the way it is (the plant owner/operators are on the board), TEPCO was able to avoid doing both of those things under "grandfathering".
Had either been performed, the meltdown would almost assuredly have been avoided.
That was a good piece. I posted this a couple of weeks ago.
Clift notes, In order to get gasoline type of range hydrogen must be compressed into a liquid at around -253C and that's not practical for a long list of reasons.
Many papers and articles have been written about TEPCO and regulatory capture. A simple google search will yield many hours of reading.
OVERKILL
$100 Site Donor 2021
Absolutely. It's horribly fascinating topic in that awful "how could it possibly be allowed to be this bad" sort of way. Elsewhere, nuclear regulation is wholly independent and this is a truly unfortunate, but very fitting demonstration of why that's necessary.
My natural gas bill has tripled from last November even though my use hasn't increased
Ours has doubled at our 2nd home in Colorado.
Electricity too
Back in my hybrid work days, the point of fuel cell is not to get the range of one refill to the same as gasoline, but a compromise between expensive battery range and localized pollution of burning gasoline next to you. Refilling hydrogen in theory should be fast.
However, today's battery EV has advanced so much, it is now cheaper and easier to charge the range than finding a hydrogen filling station, and cheaper (because fuel cell is expensive and safe hydrogen tank is VERY EXPENSIVE). When you combine that with most hydrogen are cracked from methane rather than split from water using electricity, it just makes more sense to use battery EV instead, and burn the methane in a CCGT on your electric grid, or excess electricity during off peak hours from various sources.
Q: don't hydrogen fuel cell vehicles use hydrogen gas rather than liquid hydrogen?
Hydrogen is pretty much always gas on earth unless you bond it with something else like oxygen (water) or carbon (methane or other petroleum).
Breaking this bond is what consumes a lot of energy (electricity, heat), forming this bond is what releases a lot of energy (combustion in your engine, reaction in your fuel cell, etc). Between the 2, hydrogen fuel cell is about 90% efficient in theory, and combustion engine is likely 30% max if you burn it like natural gas in a piston engine.
This is assuming you don't waste any further energy compressing hydrogen gas into liquid for storage purposes. Most natural gas passenger cars are CNG so you don't have to keep a refrigerator running off the boil off liquid natural gas to refrigerate the liquid. Hydrogen boiling point is too low so it is pretty much always stored as a gas, or absorbed into some structure to hold together without too much pressure.
Li-Ion battery is likely 75% efficient.
Ya I wasn't clear. What I meant is whether fuel cell vehicles carry the hydrogen in gaseous form rather than as a liquid. I assumed it was always as a gas since the tanks were small.
One of the first things I built at a power station was the hydrogen generating plant (the first was the bulk CO2 storage), and at the time, Honda and Toyota were talking about how close hydrogen powerd cars were (using IC engines)...so I sat down with the production tables from the pant, and my HP15C...and was absolutely amazed that such a process was even being contemplated...and the fact that H2 IC engines are now being brought into the discussion as a "just" run cars on hydrogen explicity means that we are at simplistic, unaware of the complexity...putting "just" in front of anything makes the transistion sound simple to those who haven't looked.
Batteries and fuel cells make a bit more sense to me...
Batteries and fuel cells make a bit more sense to me...
Sounds like my water bill
What has to be done to an IC engine in order to run it on hydrogen? I'm assuming the entire fuel delivery system has to be modified.
A hydrogen burning car would be a very direct modification of a gasoline engine. The hydrogen would be mixed with air in the intake then spark ignited. Hydrogen can burn in a very lean mixture and high compression making the book thermal efficiency better than gasoline. The problem is that hydrogen is expensive per BTU and very difficult to store, especially on board a car.
It will be a very high-pressure tank to justify the range, and it will leak way more than say, CNG.
Why isn't CNG more popular? It's clean, available, and many homes have it piped right into their homes anyway. All they would need is the conversion done, and tank installed, and they could buy the pump and nozzle to fill up at home. And any additional charges for extra gas used would simply go on their gas bill.
I know Arizona did this some years back. And they were offering huge tax breaks for people who bought into it. The range was short. But if you could fill up every time you pulled into the garage, that wouldn't matter as much for a grocery getter.
I know Arizona did this some years back. And they were offering huge tax breaks for people who bought into it. The range was short. But if you could fill up every time you pulled into the garage, that wouldn't matter as much for a grocery getter.
Honda were "this close" to CNG cars in Oz, with a quite small cost high pressure compressor to "recharge" it overnight....this is where it gets interesting with current pushes for EVs.
The Govt of the day realised that they were missingout on road taxes and excises, so they passed a law stating that if you had home car charging, then you would pay the transport taxes and fuel excises on every joule ofgas that passed through your meter, not netted off, separately metered etc...every Joule...translate that to the revenue elephant in the current EV push (that's where I'll leave it.
As an aside, a big part of my state (me included are now on Day 8 of no NG and counting).
The stance was interesting, and I guess consistant, as there were similar rules regarding diesel (not fuel oil) heating...if you had diesel heating, every years, you needed to give the tax office a stat dec stating that you did not have a diesel vehicle, so as to claim tax free diesel. If you heated with fuel oil, you could have a diesel.
Guess they weren't smart enough to realize #2 fuel oil basically is diesel. Isn't offroad diesel dyed in AU? That's what they do here in the USA, randomly check for red dye in diesel tanks.
