Non fossil fuel propulsion

I'm lucky in that I have a lot of good alternative fuel sources to both produce bio fuels out of and for fracturing into diesel. So I know what a pain it is to try to act responsibly. I'm presently exploring a 37' bio diesel catamaran design for the PNW area. But my cash flow has hit another snag and until I fix that I'm kinda dead in the water.

I'm surprised that the web site I quoted didn't have the Chinese information on it. Just for fun I'll have to send those links to then and see what kinda response I get.

If your handy at all you can make your own fuel and forget the high cost of sail. Fracturing out of the right kinds of plastics yields a perfectly viable diesel option. Also simply using a gasification system works but I've not personally tested it so I'm not sure whats its power output is or how well it works in what kinda engine. My bet is it would run damn hot tho. At present I blend used motor oil, bio diesel, and a little kerosene to run my truck. I'm working on increasing my bio diesel production system so I can just run on that but folks are starting to fight over veggie oils and its just a lot easier thus far to run off used motor oil. Eventually I'll have my fracturing/gasification system up and running and then I could recycle tires and plastics into fuel. Of course thats not really solving anything in terms of pollutants, depends on the feedstock, but its free if you set it up right.

if you seperate the liquids properly you end up with a max bitumin type material that you send back to the reaction chamber, diesel, gasoline, and vent/burn off the volatile gasses, effectively using the volatile gasses is difficult because of the inconsistent pressure

Long story short there is a number of alternatives including fracturing/gasifying trash that would work fine as alternative energies, but its the volume needed that precludes a lot of them from ever getting much attention. Which is why I keep touting algae based bio diesel. Its got the potential to provide the volume and its got a ton of other benefits as well.

what would be perfect is if we could figure out how to press the lipids out of sea weed, extract the salts and process it into fuel. Extracting the salts would eat fresh water, so its a sticky point. I suppose it could be gasified but then you still have the salts problem. Once you boiled off all the water you'd inevitably get salts going through the system even if they were in a solid state. Salt boils at 1400+°C and the right temp for fractionating complex hydrocarbons into diesel is just under 400°C. so the salt wouldn't gasify, but I'm sure it would still get through the system since its just a few distillation chambers and a burn vent. Something tells me it wouldn't take much salt to screw up an engine in a hurry. But sea weed is a very very tempting fuel source if one could only figure out how to use it effectively.

Oh and those UN numbers are low, they are always low, they don't want to be called alarmists so they typically use the best case scenario numbers whenever they make a recommendation, same goes for the IPCC. Deal is we are at worst case scenario pretty much across the board if you go back over the years and look at the various agencies projections for future change. So those numbers predicted in that report ( I saw it on the news as well ) are likely low.

Anyway yah, nuke sucks, its not safe at all, its not clean at all, the companies that tout in aren't honest at all, and from what I can see the only countries espousing its use are not exactly the most environmentally or socially friendly countries I could have thought of.

cheers
B

 

The companies that espouse the use of any type of energy are probably biasing reports. Oftentimes, the same companies promote several competing energy systems in the hope of dominating the world market regardless of political decisions.

 

It is NOT controllable.

It is a function of our broken regulatory systems that mirror the dysfunctional nature of almost all western Governments when it come to dealing with advanced technologies that need good regulation to be safe and effective.

If you come up with a way to fix the government fumbling of the important choices like this, please provide a written essay describing the solution. Keep it short, but ensure that it deals with everything

 

I am on the "inside" when it comes to commercial nuclear power.

It is not as safe as it should be.

All involved parties share in the fault for this situation.

• The industry relies on helper organizations (INPO/WANO) that are Ok but they have flaws (they tend to be mostly reactive and even then they are frequently not very practical). When actual utilities try to step up to drive solutions to problem areas it creates nothing but grief. Any "problem" we bring up tends to gets twisted around and we get told to do stupid stuff to fix it. We also get beat up in the process given that our 30 year old designs did not think of every possible problem that we have discovered while operating. Also we are regulated financially and the utility commissions and "consumer advocates" tend to scream at having the rate payers pay for stuff that is not NRC driven given that these are "unjustified" plant upgrades.

• Regulatory agencies have evolved into self serving bureaucracies with no vision and no ability to focus on real issues. Any initiative from the NRC leadership to try to get "smarter" gets undermined by individual "experts" on specific little areas of concern. These folks are unwilling to admit that their favorite little pet peeves do not need to be addressed just like they want. There just seems to be no way around these "want their cake and want to eat it too" attitudes.

• The rabid "anti nuke" nuts tend to just do anything they can to throw monkey wrenches into the works to see how much grief they can create.

However, most commercial nuclear power plant are pretty safe as is and could made "safe enough" to satisfy the bulk of the people if the real choices and costs were presented based on real facts without spin from either side.

There have been three major commercial Nuclear accidents.

• Three Mile Island (TMI) was the first real wake up call for the industry. It occurred at a point where the process focused on making the plant safety systems "fully automatic and double redundant". This led to an attitude that there was no need for smart operators to do anything. This was flawed in that it allowed the plants to be run with poor training for operators and without good procedures for dealing with equipment malfunctions. This event started with a simple relief valve failure, but operators misunderstood what was happening and preventing automatic systems from doing what was needed. Even so, the multiple layers of safety system did provide good protection for the public. The utilities in the US and Western Europe probably did a good job of learning from this event. After spending unbelievable sums of money, we have pretty much fixed most of the flaws that led to this event.

• Chernobyl was an event that was caused when a really dumb process led a really arrogant operating staff to do some incredibly dumb actions during a test on a Reactor that was unstable in the conditions for the test. The lesson I took from Chernobyl was that it is really hard to make plants "idiot proof" and it really is better just to try to make sure that idiots are not in charge in the first place.

• Fukushima combined a number of flaws. Some people did a really shoddy job of sizing up what nature could throw at them. They over focused on the ground motion of earthquakes and blew off the tsunami effects. The ground motion concerns led them to lower the ground level at the plant to an unsafe distance above sea level and they even put really important stuff (station batteries) in basements (that flooded) to even further reduce the predicted seismic accelerations. Japan is also somewhat challenged given that although they put a lot of money/energy into "plant safety" they tended to focus almost exclusively on their cultural "hot button" issues like routine worker exposure and the low level releases from plants. The utilities in Japan were were also probably the least engaged in industry sharing related to safety improvements of all countries outside of the old soviet block.

The Fukushima event also shared one flaw that kind of goes back to TMI and is still prevalent at almost all facilities. There was what I see as a basic over reliance on "automatic protection" for ALL postulated events. This results in very complicated safety systems and features. Some of these actually prevented Fukushima operators from implementing timely actions needed to prevent core damage.

Generically, many of our "automatic safety features" designed for one event are the biggest things that stop operators from doing what is needed for a different event. The KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid) principle was completely and totally thrown in the very early days of plant design with no concept of where things would end up.

The unwillingness to insist that plants have well trained operators and plant designs have manual features that allow operators to get plants as safe as possible as quick as possible and with maximum potential for a good outcome really bothers me. It continues to be the one of the biggest things that make me think that the world is really not ready to build new nuke plants that can combine good safety with reasonable cost and performance.

The other item that is killing us on cost is our insistence to to keep ratcheting up the "prove it in writing to the Nth degree" standards for each and every feature with no regard to real safety significance. This actually reduces overall safety in that real issues do not get the attention they deserve, they get lost in the shuffle.

 

well there's something going on in N Illinois thats not to healthy looking, lets hope its not a 4rth major event.

Nuclear reactor looses power and is venting steam

http://news.yahoo.com/ill-nuclear-reactor-loses-power-venting-steam-203743828.html

 

Interesting topic. All the fossil fuel burning will eventually die down and designers will have no choice but to consider altarnatives. This one from the Japanese looks very logical (tall mast cargo ships with solar energy panels to store energy).

http://www.greenoptimistic.com/2011/02/24/eco-marine-power-solar-ships/

Wind & sun are free...may as well spend more time learning how to maximize their potential. Their web site has some quite interesting product concepts.

http://www.ecomarinepower.com/products

 

While I am an enthusiast of 'green' technologies, can I encourage you not to spread the myth that "wind and sun are free".

Anyone who has ever paid for mast and sails, and solar panels and regulators knows it is a fallacy, and is a lot more expensive than fossil fuels.

There are any number of discussions on this site that have detailed the reasons for this if you care to check them out.

Meantime, I will always try to reduce my need for fossil fuels as you so wisely propose.

 

I agree for the most part, but would point out the wind and sun are indeed free. What is costly as you point out are the current materials (masts + sails for wind/ solar panels + converters + batteries for sun). However, economies of scale have not yet played out for these newer concepts. This is the reason they are more expensive at the moment.

Beyond this, governments play a role. Many fossil based energy companies enjoy subsidies, tax breaks, etc. to lower costs and hold on to their monopolistic positions. With such benefits stripped away and realigned to cleaner technologies, no doubt the competitive game will change.

Imagine a world where businesses are rewarded for being smarter and offering cleaner products.

This is the other side of the argument.

In the end, people will need to decide the best way forward by voting for leaders who support a better way.

 

Sail and solar panels are energy capture devices, Fossil fuels like batteries store energy and must be replenished .It took about 600 million years to make the stuff we have managed to burn half of in the first 100 years of the petroleum age. Nuclear and I suppose tidal (gravity?) are the only way we have of producing energy in the quantities we need that are not dependent on the sun. And as I understand it the best we can hope to achieve with solar cells is about a 40% conversion efficiency that will not capture the energy in the next 600 million years that photosynthesis has in the last. Maybe if the whole planets surface is devoted to the managed production of biofuels (photosynthesis} we can reduce that period to a million years or so. That's not going to help a lot. Fossil fuels will go. If it turns out that nuclear is untenable then conservation will be forced upon us. I think it will make for a better world.

 

Right now the total population on the earth uses around 16 TW of power a year. The sun delivers 174,000 TW of power to the earth a year. So we need only harnes a small fraction of that from solar panels to power the entire worlds energy demands. In reality the efficiency of each solar panel is much less of a concern than the cost per delivered kw, and that is the primary limitation, not net efficiency. The problem is that to date renewable energy on a production level is significantly more expensive than fossil fuels, and so long as that remains the case renewables just aren't price competitive with fossil fuels.

What I have seen however is that in places where fossil fuels are very high priced, Jamaica for instance, the move to renewables has accellerated not because of government programs, but out of enlightened self interest.

The reality is that right now the cost to install a whole house solar array, using the grid for storage is still more expensive than buying the power from the grid in the first place. As soon as this ceases to be the case major power stations will start to disappear.

 

Place like Haiti and Jamaica are full of solar panels, the well to do have them. The poor have no electricity. The cost of the panels, and associated hardware make them expensive they are far more expensive than a diesel generator even for everyday use.

I have 4 solar panels on my boat, 2 75 watt units, and 2 180 watt units. They keep my DC systems up, and I use them for bilge pumps, blowers, led lights, but they don't run my boat. It would be to costly and I don't want to turn my boat into a giant solar collector.

Unfortunately, it might be another 20 years before all this significantly changes. The game changer technology is just not there yet.

Checkout these guys below, they sell to all island. A system is about $3 a watt. So 15k watt would run about $45,000
http://www.sunelec.com/index.php?main_page=systems_off_grid

 

Deep well geothermal has more high density power potential than any source other than Nukes or Fossil.

The open loop efforts (send water down one hole, let it perk over to another hole where it comes up) have been very disappointing.

I am sure it would be expensive at first, but closed loop would have a real potential for long term low cost operation.

As our existing thirst for fossil fuels drives advances in deep well drilling, I only hope that this will eventually carry over and enable extracting more of this really clean energy.

 

Mydauphin,

In Jamaica at least you are right that the poor don't have much access to electricity, but a large part of that is the cost, not availability. The problem is that since Jamaica has to import 100% of the fuel to operate its power plants it depresses the value of the Jamaican dollar on the world stage' meaning power is extremely expensive, hovering around 38 cents a KW, as compared to the us where it is more like 15.

Installed solar is actually cheaper than mains power in Jamaica right now, which has encouraged the government to remove all import tariffs and taxes on solar power and all renewables, and so the richest people in the country have started to install solar power, and other renewables. This has driven down the demand on the grid, which has started to reduce the outage problem that has plagued the island for years, as well as contributing to stabilizing the foreign exchange rate of the Jamaican dollar.

Is it perfect? No. Far from it, but it is a start. And with prices continuing to favor solar power over fossil fuels it is not outrageous to imagine that even though it is poor on the world stage, Jamaica could be one of the most heavily invested in PV installations in the coming years, simply because it is cheaper.

 

Realize that the reason it is cheaper is because just like in Haiti, the governments of Jamaica are so disorganized or crooked they steal all the money and can not run a decent power plant. Chavez donated a couple of 65mw gas power to Haiti and after a couple of months they could not keep them going properly. It is cheaper in some places not because solar is cheaper, it is that the individuals are setting it up and running it for themselves.

 

I am all for powering boats with sail and solar . I am attempting to design a boat that does this using products commercially available now. After almost a year of screwing around I have discovered that even if I use a Torqeedo 4k outboard with 4 of Torqeedo's 26 v lithium ion batteries And an array of 10 215 wat solar panels .total cost about $40.000,and weighing all in about about 1000 lbs, in order for the boat to operate at half throttle at 5 knots in full sun and using half the battery capacity for 5 hours the boat itself will have to be pencil thin and weigh less than 3000lbs( expensive). This makes providing for accommodation or stores a little difficult. The problem is real estate for the solar panels. I suspect that the commercial development of solar will encounter the same problem.While the sun does provide more energy than we need solar panels, like plants. need to be in areas that have sun and also need to be close to cities ( transmission losses). These areas correspond to the most expensive real estate on the planet. It is true that houses can be designed to be totally solar but these structure's take up a lot of expensive real estate and that is precisely the reason that we see condo and other high rise development that is not suitable for solar taking over the accommodation market.