Wake Up Call for Green Energy

[Walnut Beast]

Musk was laughing it off. Maybe not now

https://www.hydrogenfuelnews.com/hydrogen-bottles-namx-huv/8556266/

[Ron Wenrich]

The Japanese seem to be pretty far ahead of us in commercializing hydrogen.  They are producing cars and have a pickup in the works.  In addition, they're working on ICE cars and trucks.  I guess a conversion might be in the works.  They're looking at refuel time to be reduced from 5 minutes to 1½ minutes.  With refuel time like that, it will put a dent in the battery EVs.  All that is needed is the development of hydrogen stations.  

In this country, we seem to be looking mainly at solar and wind with large battery backup.  Hydrogen is left to the private industry to develop.  They're building a big one in Texas using renewables for energy to electrolize for hydrogen.

As for fusion being to cheap to meter, they told us that back in the 60s when they built 3 Mile Island.  Even when they were going full bore, the meters kept running.  The accident put all the costs on the consumer.  They shut the second reactor down last year.  No one wanted to buy the electricity. 

[Don P]

I thought someone would remember  .
For a grain of salt, hydrogen and fusion have been a decade away, my whole life.

[SwampDonkey]

Toyota have had hybrids since 2006 up here, being sold, not concepts. For some reason an article I read a year ago talked about it being something that just came to be. It's been 'came to be' quite awhile ago. :D The vehicles I saw then were Camry's now include RAV4's.

[Walnut Beast]

On the fusion it was said that 200 of the most powerful lasers were all aimed to the size of a bb. They say another twenty to thirty years before everything is perfected 

[Don P]

Then all you gotta do is keep the sun in a bottle.

[SwampDonkey]

Just takes the will and money$$ and someone behind it with some push to see it through. As one NASA engineer said, 'we knew it wasn't going to be easy, but we knew we could do it'. ;D Maybe we need a big fear story to speed it up, that certainly helped the 'bomb' and the 'moon landing'. :D

[bigblockyeti]

Toyota have had hybrids since 2006 up here, being sold, not concepts. For some reason an article I read a year ago talked about it being something that just came to be. It's been 'came to be' quite awhile ago. :D The vehicles I saw then were Camry's now include RAV4's.

They certainly have been around for a while and people have gotten the chance to choose them if they so desired.  Now they're being shoved down people's throats.  The new Sienna can only be had as a hybrid with a rougher running 4 cylinder ICE compared to the very refined 3.5L V6 that's been extremely reliable for some time.  My brother's '16 Sienna (with the good engine) was total a couple weeks ago, due to Toyota's lack of foresight, he's buying a Honda Odyssey.  Toyota is doing the same with the Lexus RX350, arguably a crowd where a rough running engine will be more of a sticking point.

Hybrids, at least where I'm at, also command a premium to register, on the order of about double the cost of a simplier ICE powered vehicle.

[Southside]

Well the EU just decided to create an import tariff on a number of items, to include hydrogen,  that escalated quickly.  

[Don P]

What? No "Remember the Hindenburg!"  :D
Old memory but I don't think it liquifies till around 5000 psi, which would not be good to wreck with. Carrying gas as vapor probably isn't much range. 

The little engine in the Ranger is a screamer on alcohol, well, for a 3.0 :D. 

Is the higher cost of registering a hybrid meant to recover the lost fuel tax?

[SwampDonkey]

Here in NB, the registration fee goes by weight classes. Not engine type. At the time father bought a regular Camry, it cost more than a hybrid Camry. But I believe that was more to do with the dealer pricing. And that Camry had been a demo car, ran by the dealership owner a year.

[bigblockyeti]

Is the higher cost of registering a hybrid meant to recover the lost fuel tax?

Yes, and registration for full electric vehicles is ~4x the same thing with an ICE engine.
I don't believe they delineate between the different hybrid systems either, it has it and your bill is double or it doesn't and it isn't.  This creates a pretty big problem especially with something like a Chevy Volt which could serve as full electric since it's a plug in hybrid.  At the other end of the spectrum is Fiat's E-torque system available on the V6 & V8 1/2 ton RAM trucks which add something like 13hp and still gets crap fuel economy but just barely pushes the emissions in the right direction for Fiat to maintain some XYZ certification.

[newoodguy78]

Climate change isn't a threat to life on Earth in general, or even mankind. Things will adjust, migrate, evolve etc. We know the Earth has been both warmer and colder in the past. Woolly mammoths used to wander around Greenland a couple of million years ago. But the climate changed, and they are now extinct (that may or may not be related)

But we KNOW the climate can change for "reasons".  We also KNOW the CO2 level has changed drastically in the last 100 years, way above what they have been for the last million.

It's interesting to me that we " KNOW " for certain that C02 levels have changed so drastically in the last 100 million years. Didn't realize there was credible records documenting this from so far back. Is there a link to this information. I'm assuming it must be photos of cave walls with the data scratched in with a stone  :D

[Southside]

Hey, we know that DDT is safe, Crypto is secure, and Anna Nicole married for love, so why not?  :D

[doc henderson]

there are a ton of indirect ways.  In my research, I had to go at 6 am and 6pm each of 3 days for each run.  I ground up the plant leaves.  I titrated the pH and recorded it for that sample.  Then it went into a desiccator oven, and after fully dehydrated, it was weighed.  the control was plants that were not water distress.  we looked to see if the stressed plants had a lower pH.  CO2 + H2O = H2CO3= H+ + HCO3-.  the end of the equation is a proton and bicarb.  the definition of pH has to do with the inverse log of the hydrogen ion concentration.  so, the mor H+ the lower the pH. (acidic).

I think Ice that dated way back was tested and they determined the CO@ amount.  is it accurate?  no way to tell for sure as there is no control.  but we should see the trend.  does increasing CO@ mean the earth will end in 7 years?  what? how can you conclude that.  Is it then irreversible?  what?  how can we know this.  Is it likely?  I do not think so.  Do I know for sure?  no.  No one does.  

pH
1 of 2
noun
ˈpē-ˈāch

: a measure of acidity and alkalinity of a solution that is a number on a scale on which a value of 7 represents neutrality and lower numbers indicate increasing acidity and higher numbers increasing alkalinity and on which each unit of change represents a tenfold change in acidity or alkalinity and that is the negative logarithm of the effective hydrogen-ion concentration or hydrogen-ion activity in gram equivalents per liter of the solution
also : the condition represented by a pH number

Proton
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

A proton is a stable subatomic particle, symbol p, H+, or 1H+ with a positive electric charge of +1 e elementary charge. Its mass is slightly less than that of a neutron and 1,836 times the mass of an electron (the proton–electron mass ratio). Protons and neutrons, each with masses of approximately one atomic mass unit, are jointly referred to as "nucleons" (particles present in atomic nuclei). One or more protons are present in the nucleus of every atom. They provide the attractive electrostatic central force which binds the atomic electrons. The number of protons in the nucleus is the defining property of an element, and is referred to as the atomic number (represented by the symbol Z). Since each element has a unique number of protons, each element has its own unique atomic number, which determines the number of atomic electrons and consequently the chemical characteristics of the element. The word proton is Greek for "first", and this name was given to the hydrogen nucleus by Ernest Rutherford in 1920. In previous years, Rutherford had discovered that the hydrogen nucleus (known to be the lightest nucleus) could be extracted from the nuclei of nitrogen by atomic collisions.[9] Protons were therefore a candidate to be a fundamental or elementary particle, and hence a building block of nitrogen and all other heavier atomic nuclei. Although protons were originally considered elementary particles, in the modern Standard Model of particle physics, protons are now known to be composite particles, containing three valence quarks, and together with neutrons are now classified as hadrons. Protons are composed of two up quarks of charge +2/3e and one down quark of charge −1/3e. The rest masses of quarks contribute only about 1% of a proton's mass.[10] The remainder of a proton's mass is due to quantum chromodynamics binding energy, which includes the kinetic energy of the quarks and the energy of the gluon fields that bind the quarks together. Because protons are not fundamental particles, they possess a measurable size; the root mean square charge radius of a proton is about 0.84–0.87 fm (or 0.84×10−15 to 0.87×10−15 m).[11][12] In 2019, two different studies, using different techniques, found this radius to be 0.833 fm, with an uncertainty of ±0.010 fm.[13][14] Free protons occur occasionally on Earth: thunderstorms can produce protons with energies of up to several tens of MeV.[15][16] At sufficiently low temperatures and kinetic energies, free protons will bind to electrons. However, the character of such bound protons does not change, and they remain protons. A fast proton moving through matter will slow by interactions with electrons and nuclei, until it is captured by the electron cloud of an atom. The result is a protonated atom, which is a chemical compound of hydrogen. In a vacuum, when free electrons are present, a sufficiently slow proton may pick up a single free electron, becoming a neutral hydrogen atom, which is chemically a free radical. Such "free hydrogen atoms" tend to react chemically with many other types of atoms at sufficiently low energies. When free hydrogen atoms react with each other, they form neutral hydrogen molecules (H2), which are the most common molecular component of molecular clouds in interstellar space.

Crassulacean acid metabolism - Wikipedia

[Ianab]

Then all you gotta do is keep the sun in a bottle.

That's effectively what a Tokamak fusion system attempts to do. Contain superheated plasma in a doughnut shaped magnetic bottle. As you can imagine this isn't simple either, and if the reaction leaks out it tends to melt random bits of the machine. 200 million degree plasma tends to do that. 
Anyway, if it was easy we would all have self flying "Mr Fusion" powered Teslas by now.... We don't, so I'm concluding it's not easy. 
This is the experimental Tokamak system MIT is building, so there is still some serious research being done. This also isn't a complete power generator, it's only designed to run short bursts of fusion on an experimental basis, It has no generator system attached, that's a problem for later. 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPARC_(tokamak) 

[Southside]

That kinda sounds like medical science saying they have perfected brain transplants, just leaving the problem of the patient surviving for later.  :D

[twar]

I think Ice that dated way back was tested and they determined the CO@ amount.  is it accurate?  no way to tell for sure as there is no control.  but we should see the trend.  does increasing CO@ mean the earth will end in 7 years?  what? how can you conclude that.  Is it then irreversible?  what?  how can we know this.  Is it likely?  I do not think so.  Do I know for sure?  no.  No one does.  

No, we don't know.

When we do know, we may find out that we over-reacted. Or we (or more likely our grandchildren) may find out that, d###, we screwed up. Back in the 2010s and 20s we should have...

But we don't know.

[brianJ]

I think Ice that dated way back was tested and they determined the CO@ amount.  is it accurate?  no way to tell for sure as there is no control.  but we should see the trend.  does increasing CO@ mean the earth will end in 7 years?  what? how can you conclude that.  Is it then irreversible?  what?  how can we know this.  Is it likely?  I do not think so.  Do I know for sure?  no.  No one does.  

No, we don't know.

When we do know, we may find out that we over-reacted. Or we (or more likely our grandchildren) may find out that, d###, we screwed up. Back in the 2010s and 20s we should have...

But we don't know.

I think most people on FF are in the same campground on CO2 and global warming.    I call us luke warmers.    Yeah lets do the things that make sense.   Not lets transform whole sectors of the economy.    
Beyond that I think anything else I say should be in the woodshed.

[Walnut Beast]

Now they have solved the recharging problems on the cars ?? You guessed it solar panels on the cars self charging 😂

https://sonomotors.com/

[stavebuyer]

Might run the radio. In Texas. In summer. lol

[SwampDonkey]

Musk just sold off more Tesla shares this week, $3.6 billion. Share price for Tesla this year has been cut more than half. From a high of $400 in Jan to a low of $150 now. Sale deliveries are below projections.

[Ron Wenrich]

He's losing his Chinese market.  They are producing their own.

[SwampDonkey]

Yeah, they have lots of companies over there making and selling and far cheaper. But that has been the Chinese model, cheap, and less reliable. Keeps you buying to replace. :D

[Don_Papenburg]

I read that a large grove in Fla. was  infusing the air in the grove with CO2. they used combustion gas and cooled it with water mist .  That made it heavy enough to stay "grounded" .  It helped increase yield . Not real cost effective . So the plan is to hook up to the exhaust stacks of the power plant next to the grove for the next years trials. They have ductwork stretched among the trees with smaller hoses placed up into the lower branches.

I was indoctrinated in grade school to believe that we needed the CO2 for the plants,so that the plants could make O2 that the humans and animals could survive.