Tesla Model S, Third Fire

[zapta]

60 Minutes had recently an interesting piece about the US 'cleantech' industry.

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/cleantech-crash-60-minutes/

[SLJ]

Nuclear is not profitable or safe.  Corporations can only afford to build them if the government subsidizes them with your tax dollars.

[dfmischler]

And nuclear is very clean. No CO2, no soot.

That depends on how you define "clean".  Completely ignoring the Three Mile Islands, Chernobyls, and Fukushimas of the world, I live not too far from West Valley, NY, where Nuclear Fuel Services Inc once tried to reprocess spent nuclear fuel and left a bit of a mess.  The NYS DEC estimates clean up could be done for around $1 billion.  And that is cheap compared to the clean-up costs at Oak Ridge, or Hanford.  Even decommissioning a relatively simple nuclear reactor site is not cheap.

Despite the appearance of this post, I am not an anti-nuke nut.  I do not regret the project I did for a DOE subcontractor decades ago that required me to get a 'Q' clearance.  I love the idea of nuclear energy, but the way we have done nuclear power so far is shortsighted and failure prone.

[SgtRock]

Dear SLJ:

Nuclear is not profitable or safe.  Corporations can only afford to build them if the government subsidizes them with your tax dollars.

--Most nuclear power plants are built by corporations for utilities, which are quasi governmental institutions. The corporations make their money from building and operating the plants. Here in Florida at least I am unaware of any subsidies being paid to the corporations which build an operate these plants. Could you please cite a specific subsidy? France, which is oil poor gets 75% of its electricity from nuclear, so it must be more profitable than oil, and the French consider it cleaner than coal.

--There must, by now, be at least half a dozen designs for inherently safe reactors. So, the way forward is likely to be at least partially nuclear based. Some of the designs for Thorium reactors, being advocated by Bill Gates, and under serious consideration by China and India may soon be built.

http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/bill-gates-is-beginning-to-dream-the-thorium-dream

--I have not seen any data comparing the carbon footprint of Nuclear vs PV Solar and Wind, so if anyone knows of any, please post a link.

"All cats are grey in the dark" [From "In Praise of Older Women"]
Benjamin Franklin  1706 - 1790

Best Regards
Clear Ether

[Kremmen]

Based on real life experience where i live nuclear power is both safe (zero major accidents over the entire history of nuke power) and profitable (or so i imagine based on the fact that private power companies are not state subsidized).
Of course the technology here is considerably newer than the oldest post-war reactors partly designed to produce bomb fissionables, and built under very strict control compared to some places with more relaxed attitude towards plant safety in general an nuke plants in particular.

I am not anti renewable wind and solar - i think they are great ideas but at the same time they do not have the potential to be the technology for year round bulk energy generation at least on these latitudes. In that sense i am pro nuclear compared to coal and similar and provided the strict safety standards are maintained.

[dfmischler]

In that sense i am pro nuclear compared to coal and similar and provided the strict safety standards are maintained.

Good.  Now let's try to see a few more aspects of the whole system life-cycle.  What kind of plant are you near (light water reactor is most common)?  Where does your local plant's fuel come from?  How does it get to the plant?  Where will the fuel go when it is no longer useful for power generation?  How will it get there?  What will happen to the site when the current plant can no longer be economically operated?

[SeanB]

I will ask the same for the coal mine, the same for any other mine like iron ore, copper, gold, other precious metals and aluminium. All leave a hole in the ground and a tailings heap that contains toxic sludge.

Nuclear fuel is recyclable many times but the political will is not there, so essentially you only get 1% of the potential energy contained in it, and leave the rest to be generated in heating  storage ponds.

[dfmischler]

No argument that the other energy industries have also been short-sighted when it comes to long-term environmental impacts.  The more we learn as a society about these issues the more we say, "Oops."  But fixing these mistakes is much harder once we have already made them.

For example, natural gas is being heavily pushed in the USA for heat and power generation at this time.  In New York state hydraulic fracturing (aka fracking) is pretty controversial and is not being allowed at this time (although it is being done in neighboring Pennsylvania).  It doesn't help that the companies who want to do it will not disclose what chemicals they want to inject.  It is really hard for anybody, let alone your typical citizen, to separate the true facts from the rhetoric espoused by those who have an economic or political agenda for or against the practice.

[niflheimer]

Of course the technology here is considerably newer than the oldest post-war reactors partly designed to produce bomb fissionables, and built under very strict control compared to some places with more relaxed attitude towards plant safety in general an nuke plants in particular.

Indeed , I have to say I'm kinda envious about that EPR you guys are building at Olkiluoto . It makes our 20 years old Candu 6 units look like relics

Waste-related though , yes , it's expensive to clean , contain and dispose BUT that is solely the plant operator's responsability (at least down here in Europe ) . The plant operator pays , in adition to a percentual tax on every MW they are producing a fixed fee per kilogram of fresh fuel .

During the entire life of a unit ( which can be quite long - 60 years in some cases ) the amout that gets colected for decomissioning and fuel disposal is stagering . As an example , I've just wrote a paper on geological fuel disposal in Spain. The cost for a geological repository , including operating costs, built in granite and  including operating costs is around 7 bilion euro for the 9 operational and shut down plants they have. The last plant's operating licence will expire in 2022 .

I've only considered the funds collected since 2007 and the total amount , by the time they close down the last one exceeds 8 billion euro - more than enough to r&d , build and operate that deposit for the next 100 years. And that's considering Spain is running a pure open ended fuel cycle - they don't reprocess it at all.

We've gone a long way since the first and second generation reactors ( and keep in mind , TMI , Cernobyl and Daichi plants were all second generation plants with close to no security features ) . The current gen 3+ reactors like the EPR in Finland are at least two orders of magnitude safer . IIRC , they estimated the probabilyityof core damage and radioactive releases for EPRs at less than 10^-8/year. And the future Gen 4 plants will be even better.


Yes , we have to switch from oil and coal to something else , that's a given. But I don't think solar and wind is the way to go - at least not yet. We need a power source to keep our base consumption on 24/7 , and the only things that can do that are nuclear and hydro - and there simply aren't enough rivers left unused to support the vast number of hydro plants that we'd need.

[tom66]

Fuel cells, more like fool cells...

Hydrogen from water is essentially a myth, electrolysis is about 3% efficient so it would be extremely expensive to implement, the electricity cost makes it uneconomical and it would produce more CO2 than ordinary petrol.

Hydrogen from natural gas is the most common route. That is up to 80% efficient on a good day. Hydrogen is transported and stored at the fuelling station. Its then compressed (typically electrically) to the desired pressure level, as there is no common standard for tank pressure yet. The car typically uses 2,000 to 10,000 psi with higher pressures being more common.

This still emits CO2. About 9 to 12 tons CO2 released per ton of hydrogen produced... http://www.aidic.it/cet/10/19/007.pdf
 
The Hyundai FCEV SUV (http://www.autocar.co.uk/car-review/hyundai/ix35/first-drives/hyundai-ix35-fuel-cell-first-drive-review#)  drives 400 miles on 144 litres of hydrogen... or 360ml hydrogen per mile... how much does this weigh?  I can't find any sources on this from a quick search but I've heard talk of kg's of hydrogen being used and pricing in kg too.

360ml = 1 mile go juice, Tesla Model S = 180gCO2/mile from UK power, if production of 360ml produces more than 180g CO2 (20g hydrogen required to produce that) it's not looking good for FCEV...

I don't know the figures so can't comment on if it works out.

Carbon capture could be implemented but it remains to be seen if that is practical.

Lets also not ignore the fact that fuel cells are still incredibly expensive -- around 85% the price of an FCEV... and there's that tank of highly compressed hydrogen sitting in your garage.

Now petrol burns. It can explode but it usually burns, reasonably fast but not an explosion unless well contained and with the right mix of fuel and air, or as a vapour. Lithium ion batteries melt and burn slowly if something goes really wrong, the fire in the Teslas was 99% plastic, glycol coolant and metals burning, the vent ports are at the front of the car  and the resulting hot gases/flames will start ancillary fires. Hydrogen? What if there's a leak? Hydrogen doesn't burn. Hydrogen explodes... look how quickly Hindenburg went up... now imagine a FCEV with a leak that gets a spark, and there's plenty of those around.

One spark, one ground connection arc, and one leak somewhere...

Now I'm sure you can make a tank resistant to crashes and impacts. But ultimately you're stuck with physical limitations. Hydrogen atoms are the smallest out there. Hardly anything can 100% contain a hydrogen atom.  The leak needn't be visible to the eye. A tiny manufacturing defect -- a bubble of air, maybe, trapped in the casing of the tank -- and you have a leak. That leak could be a fire risk.

The other question is, yes, the tank is crash resistant, but HOW crash resistant? Although you're probably not going to hit dangerou speed in a car that does 0-60 in 10 seconds any time soon, when the cars improve and we have fast cars using this tech, what happens at an 80mph impact? I don't expect anyone in the impacted car to survive, no car can guarantee that -- but what could happen if that tank does rupture? Explosion? Fire? Would that cause problems for other vehicles?

[nctnico]

There are lots of cars running on LPG on the road. They don't pose a major risk due to their compressed gas tanks otherwise they would have been banned long ago. Don't forget the gas is stored as a liquid which needs to vaporize before it can mix properly with air.

According to Wikipedia 1 litre of H2 in liquid form (I assume the H2 is stored in liquid form like LPG) weighs about 71 grams.
There is 8.5MJ of energy in one litre of H2. Say the vehicle needs roughly 225Wh/km to move and has an fuel cell+motor control efficiency of 50% then it would need 1.62MJ per km. That would add up to 190ml or 13.5 grams of H2/km.
But I'm comparing with a small EV which has regenerative braking etc. The big He-Young-Die SUV needs 225ml/km so it uses 16 grams of H2 per km. If the ratio of CO2 emission is 12 to 1 it would add up to 192 grams of CO2 per km. All in all that is pretty bad.

[tom66]

LPG tanks operate around 100 psi though, don't they? Hydrogen tanks operate around 5,000 to 10,000 psi... doesn't that mean they're different in terms of safety?

Thanks for info on CO2. That would seem to confirm suspicions of CO2 emissions being no better, if not possibly worse, than conventional efficient diesel engines which the average customer can actually afford.

And in comparison, the Tesla, which costs around half as much offers insane acceleration, decent range  and not much greater CO2 (~40% more at present, per km) from a mostly coal powered country (UK.)

BEVs can't offer 5 minute recharges, but nearly everything else about them beats a hydrogen car. And the infrastructure for most fuelling is already there... in the form of the household plug socket.

[niflheimer]

Disclaimer : I honestly don't give a crap about my CO2 emissions .

That being said , I wish I had the money for a Tesla . I get 300 kW a month for free from my workplace , and since I'm less than 10 kilometers from a NPP quest what my CO2 emission would be ? Yeap , about 0

I have to agree about hydrogen - a few weeks ago I had to buy a bigger bottle of hydrogen for my EngD studies since I was running out way too fast using lectures bottles.  I bough a H2 detector as well . Let's just say this blog made me a bit wary of it.

http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2010/06/30/how_not_to_do_it_hydrogen_gas_mixtures.php

[zapta]

Lets also not ignore the fact that fuel cells are still incredibly expensive -- around 85% the price of an FCEV...

It's not expensive, it just requires higher subsidies ;-)

That's the magic of taxpayers' money.

[nctnico]

I have to agree about hydrogen - a few weeks ago I had to buy a bigger bottle of hydrogen for my EngD studies since I was running out way too fast using lectures bottles.  I bough a H2 detector as well . Let's just say this blog made me a bit wary of it.

A while ago one of my customers showed be a big ass lead acid battery which exploded due to forming H2. That got pretty messy as well.

[SeanB]

I remember a story about a gent who went into a battery charging bay and lit a cigarette. Good news is he survived, though he was rather shaken up, deaf for a month and needed new pants. No battery was intact, and the roof did what it was designed to and blew off.

Kind of why the explosives factory is spread over a 30 hectare section of grassland, with little plants dotted here and there.

[Kremmen]

In that sense i am pro nuclear compared to coal and similar and provided the strict safety standards are maintained.

Good.  Now let's try to see a few more aspects of the whole system life-cycle.  What kind of plant are you near (light water reactor is most common)?

Actually i am not very close to any of them. There is not a huge number of plants in Finland and those are clustered at two main areas both a bit elsewhere. But whether close or far was never a factor in my life.
The closer ones to me are the 2 oldest plants in Finland - 2 Russian made VVER type pressurized water reactors. Only the actual reactor with some ancillary equipment actually came from Russia - all control gear and safety equipment is either Western or domestic manufacture. Things like the primary cooling circuit electrics, fuel rod manipulators and other electric and control gear came from my then employer Stromberg, now part of ABB. I vaguely recall actually seeing the primary circuit maglev pump motors at the Stromberg factory before shipment...
The latest generating plants under construction will be the new EPR (European Pressurized Water) designs http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Pressurized_Reactor.
As to should i be worried about radioactive leakage from those plants? If so, i only need to check what's up in real time: http://www.stuk.fi/sateily-ymparistossa/sateilytilanne/en_GB/sateilytilanne/

Where does your local plant's fuel come from?  How does it get to the plant?

I don't know exactly where the fuel for each of the plants comes from at any given time. But i am not worried - the Radiation and Nuclear Safety Authority http://www.stuk.fi/en_GB/ will definitely know and enforce the agreed legislation over that matter. In fact it is a big deal and quite strictly controlled as you will find if you check the pages i linked above. Same thing with transporting the fuel.

Where will the fuel go when it is no longer useful for power generation?  How will it get there?  What will happen to the site when the current plant can no longer be economically operated?

All spent fuel will be processed inside the borders of Finland. Actually, Finland is the first country implementing a final storage site for spent nuclear material. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repository. Again, i don't know the minutiae of how the fuel will be transported but i have every confidence that they didn't miss just that part of the equation. Maybe the Rad Authority site has something on that as well.

[niflheimer]

Transport for the used fuel will be frikkin expensive . I remember reading a report that said it would be close to 10% of the total operational cost - around 800-900 million euro. But it's to be expected , Finland's regulations are indeed quite tight - and unlike others they actually enforce them.

I do remember something I've seen a while ago when I was interning at a conventional plant. The generators were hydrogen cooled , and one of the pipes sprung a hole and ignited .
There were like 15 people in there when it happened - I've never seen anyone running faster than those guys . Only one , an older engineer took off his parka , wrapped it around the pipe and extinguished the flame.

If that pipe would have burst I doubt they would have been able to recover any equipment from that machine room.

[SeanB]

Normally when that happens they lose the whole machine room, it tends to leave in great big chunks and scatters itself all over the district.

My dad had a story of a diesel donkey engine that was started with compressed air. One day they connected an oxygen cylinder to it as the nitrogen was finished, and swung it over to start it. The half ton head landed in a farmer's field a kilometer away, and they never did find the piston or crankshaft from the hole it had dug. Luckily the shed it was in was corrugated sheet that just blew flat.

[nctnico]

Transport for the used fuel will be frikkin expensive . I remember reading a report that said it would be close to 10% of the total operational cost - around 800-900 million euro. But it's to be expected , Finland's regulations are indeed quite tight - and unlike others they actually enforce them.

I wonder how much of that cost is due to eco-activists. I guess most of it. Loading re-enforced containers onto a train or truck can't be that expensive.

[dr.diesel]

I don't recall the exact specifics, but at the power plant the H2 tank was required to be so far away from the building, 100 yards in memory serves.  In the city everything is so packed together and I'd assume there would be some unique storage requirements at the filling station as well?

[SeanB]

I would guess about the same as any other LPG refiller, though you probably would have a natural bare area after the first explosion.

[Kremmen]

Transport for the used fuel will be frikkin expensive . I remember reading a report that said it would be close to 10% of the total operational cost - around 800-900 million euro. But it's to be expected , Finland's regulations are indeed quite tight - and unlike others they actually enforce them.

I wonder how much of that cost is due to eco-activists. I guess most of it. Loading re-enforced containers onto a train or truck can't be that expensive.

To transport nuclear waste is so much more than just hoist a few barrels on the flatbed and hit the road.
Firstly you must have a permission issued by the Rad Authority to move any radioactive materials at all, whatever their nature. This begins with a complete transport plan outlining all the steps, equipment and crew to handle the job. Then you need to plan the route and ensure there won't be any surprises along the way. Then you need a separate safety plan covering all the basics plus any foreseeable contingencies. Only then can you present the plan to Rad Authority for approval. All of this will have to be completed well ahead of time, there won't be any last minute exceptions.

If we talk about spent fuel specifically, used to be it went to Chelyabinsk in Russia for reprocessing but not any more after the legislation that expressly forbids export. Processing of the material in Russia was - let's say partly carefree and partly against Finland's policy of resisting nuclear armaments proliferation.
At this time nuke waste is not transported at all. Instead it is kept in intermediate storage at the power plants pending final storage. The approval for construction of the high-active waste storage is nearing completion and it will take a few years to expand the facilities so they can start actually receiving the stuff.

[tom66]

Just for reference here's a ~2,500 psi CNG tank exploding.


Would the effective explosion of a 10,000 psi tank be 4 times, 16 times, 64 times or X times more forceful? I want to say 64 times but I admit I haven't thought carefully about the physics. Think it should behave like a cube law though.

Amazed that guy walked away and there was no ignition of gas. He seemed to know something was up judging by his reaction of running away shortly before. Perhaps he could hear the fault occurring (overpressure? leaking seal?)

[nctnico]

@Kremmen: Ofcourse the transport must be planned carefully. OTOH the start and destination are usually the same. No need to make a new plan every time. Just check for changes along the route.