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https://www.imperial.ac.uk/news/179526/researchers-show-diesel-fumes-could-cause/
If the boffins actually get nuclear fusion working, and commercialised, then pretty much every current power generation source is going to be obsolete. Power when you need it, and minimal pollution/waste. It would make even more sense to use the extra capacity overnight to produce hydrogen. It's not that efficient using current tech, but it eliminates the environmental issue of lithium, allows fast refuelling, and reduces the weight.
When you look at the end to end environmental cost of renewables, they're pretty poor. Wind turbines have to run for a lot of
years to balance the energy taken to create their concrete bases (IIRC it's many decades), and it's debateable if solar panels ever repay their impact given the amount of energy required to create them.
And that's before you consider that you still have to have enough power stations to allow for when renewables aren't producing anything. It's far more efficient to run power stations at capacity, rather have them just ticking over for when renewable inevitably can't cope. Battery storage can help alleviate the intermittent nature of renewables, but then you're back at either low density/efficiency lead-acid, or highly polluting lithium. Hardly environmentally friendly.
There's not any one ideal solution, especially once you look at details, and not just the bits selected groups want to highlight while ignoring other bits.
The only fusion power station that works is operated and contained by gravity, and is 93 million miles away.
The best thing to do is stop wasting money trying to make it work on Earth and use it to improve the capture of that free energy.
The calculations for payback on energy investment in renewables are quite a lot different now too, as the technology moves beyond the early development phase.
"Take these three items, some WD-40, a vise grip, and a roll of duct tape. Any man worth his salt can fix almost any problem with this stuff alone." - Walt Kowalski
"Only two things are infinite - the universe, and human stupidity. And I'm not sure about the universe." - Albert Einstein
If as a species we stopped trying to profit from it for a couple of decades and just accepted that we needed to do something pretty sharpish for the good of the planet and the good of our own, and all, species then I reckon we could have easily solved the energy crisis by now. The technology is out there but instead of sharing knowledge and pooling effort and advancement it's all hush-hush secret squirrel type stuff in case it gives one corporate conglomerate the competitive edge over another.
Either that or there's a huge amount of red tape and/or cost implications which means it's not economical to use certain technology or it's not had the rubber stamp of approval from some minister in the department for procrastination to say it's ok to use.
There is no 'H' in Aych, you know that don't you? ~ Wife
Turns out there is an H in Haych! ~ Sporky
Bit of trading feedback here.
65MPG - quite happy with that
There is no 'H' in Aych, you know that don't you? ~ Wife
Turns out there is an H in Haych! ~ Sporky
Bit of trading feedback here.
Hydrogen only seems to solve three issues - you can fill up quickly, it doesn't need anything particularly weird materials-wise inside the car, and there's nothing worse than water that comes out of the engine. Probably.
But it needs huge amounts of energy to produce, and there just isn't the solar and wind "surplus" that the hydrogen fans claim is going to provide that energy, so you're back to burning fossil fuels or using nuclear power.
Japan has an abundance of nuclear power stations, but very few of them are running, and (I think) only one at full capacity since 2011.
Given how cheap solar is getting, there could easily be a surplus within a few years if the will is there from government.
http://uk.businessinsider.com/solar-power-cost-decrease-2018-5
As the costs go down, and panels get more efficient, people will still be putting solar panels on their roofs, albeit not in the quantities that they were in the past when there were bigger incentives.
There is a lot of scope for solar on non-residential buildings as well. I'm looking out of my office window at a school with a huge roof space. Given that the system on my brother's old house could generate over 2kW on a sunny day, with a roof that size they could probably generate several hundred kW (especially with newer panels which are more efficient).
It might cost a lot to retrofit older buildings, but if you changed building standards to so that new builds had to have solar on the roof, solar would have loads of capacity in 15 years time.
I think the reason the government has stopped pushing solar is because of the intermittent nature, and the inability to store it with current technology. Using it to liberate hydrogen from water gives you a way of storing it.
A bit of subsidy for new solar will be a lot cheaper than all the grid upgrades required for battery powered cars to become mainstream.
What we need is a way to exploit zero point energy.
Plus solar energy doesn't give you that much energy. To put it in context, my neighbour runs three electric vans for local deliveries. He's just built a quite substantial new shed. Even if he covers the entire roof in solar panels, it would only produce enough power to keep two of the vans charged on a good day, and that would only be if he didn't use them during the day.
He's just paid 15k to get a suitable power supply installed, and even at that, it's only going to be enough for three standard 7KW chargers. He might add solar, but from a commercial point, it's not cost effective, unless he gets it heavily subsidised.
I don't just mean direct photovoltaic. All forms of renewable energy other than tidal and geothermal are actually indirect solar power - we just need to find better ways of capturing it. The amount of solar energy falling on the Earth is vastly greater than anything mankind can use.
"Take these three items, some WD-40, a vise grip, and a roll of duct tape. Any man worth his salt can fix almost any problem with this stuff alone." - Walt Kowalski
"Only two things are infinite - the universe, and human stupidity. And I'm not sure about the universe." - Albert Einstein
He doesn't have to generate it all himself. You can generate more than 2kW from a domestic installation. There must be millions of houses that are empty during the day, when the inhabitants are out at work. There would be a lot of surplus there if they all had solar panels.
On the subject of fusion/fission, thorium fission is probably more promising at the moment than fusion. The big advantage of Thorium is that you don't have the risk of a runaway chain reaction like you can with Uranium - so you don't get a Chernobyl/Fukashima type of situation. It's no use for making nuclear bombs, so you can let countries like Iran have it. It also has less radioactive leftovers than Uranium fission.
Here's a link to a New Scientist article on it:
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2145535-thorium-could-power-the-next-generation-of-nuclear-reactors/
I know China is working on Thorium as well. I posted a link above on that.
On solar, I am a confirmed believer that we will relatively soon (~10years, not 100) move to a decentralised grid, where almost every property has some form of solar generation capability, feeding back into the grid when you have a surplus and taking from it when you have a deficit, and paying someone somewhere some money if your net amount is use, not generation. Add Tesla's home battery concept into the equation and the whole thing becomes a very neat system where there is potentially very little need for power stations at all
This would actually shift the traditional concept of "peak hours" towards evenings as local solar generation shuts down and people are home for cooking, entertainment etc, meaning your hydrogen generation would be around lunchtime (if hydrogen cars are a thing, and it is potentially better for cars than lithium batteries, were the above to all happen)
What is interesting is that the Middle Eastern countries everyone loves to hate may still end up as major suppliers for the world's energy needs, but in the form of electricity itself rather than oil and gas used for electricity generation. There are vast amounts of unused desert with shitloads of sunshine which are perfect for solar farms. Get these (and battery and/or transmission tech) to a high enough efficiency and it may be beneficial to export the power on a huge scale
My next car, sometime next year, will be a hybrid. The one I'm looking at does all that hijninxery flipping between electric, petrol and charging automatically depending on how you are driving. If it does more than 35mpg, that will be fine for me. I don't do enough mileage for it to be a significant thing (mpg) really.
Diesel will get hammered more and more in the future, the cars cost more to by, and the fuel costs more to buy, so for me, the mpg again isn't a factor.
Tbh, if your carbon footprint is something you worry about, one of the best things you could do is to stop eating meat. Meat production world wide is more of an issue in terms of CO2 production than whether we drive a diesel car or not.
It's not climate change or environmentalism that will turn us away from oil, it's economics. Once competing technologies become cheaper and more efficient - which will obviously happen sooner in some areas than others - then oil will be yesterday's news in the same way that steam railways and horse-drawn carriages are. We may need a few incentives to push progress along, but once started it will become unstoppable.
"Take these three items, some WD-40, a vise grip, and a roll of duct tape. Any man worth his salt can fix almost any problem with this stuff alone." - Walt Kowalski
"Only two things are infinite - the universe, and human stupidity. And I'm not sure about the universe." - Albert Einstein
It's not helped by subsidies for fossil fuels:
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97-per-cent/2017/aug/07/fossil-fuel-subsidies-are-a-staggering-5-tn-per-year
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/jun/23/green-energy-subsidies-community-projects-fossil-fuels
https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2017/10/6/16428458/us-energy-coal-oil-subsidies
If they removed the subsidies for fossil fuels then it would all change very quickly.
The problem is that governments are in the pockets of big coal and big oil. There is a more legitimate concern over hundreds of thousands of people in those industries suddenly being out of work. Maybe they need a programme to reduce the subsidies to zero over a 10 year period.