Electric F-150

[John in Santa Cruz]

Hydrogen is typically made from Methane (natural gas), which is CH4. as a combustion fuel, it has a couple huge problems. 1) very low energy density, you need a LOT of it to get the same energy as a gallon of petrol or diesel, or LNG or even LP. 2) its nasty on metals, it makes them very brittle. 3) its tiny molecule size makes it leak through almost everything (which contributes to 2).

[Italian Tow]

Well you have convinced me! So its best to continue down the battery path tell we deplete those resources then to take those resources and try to utilize hydrogen (work the bugs out) Or hydrogen should just be scraped?

[mizterwizard]

Originally Posted by Italian Tow

To start with I'm no expert on either. All I've been told is that hydrogen is the most abundant chemical in our universe... I think it might be a good idea to take advantage of that source...

I guess I haven't made myself clear. Let's give it another try.

Hydrogen is the most element in the universe. The very thing that makes it so desirable as a fuel makes it hard to get. Hydrogen reacts readily with many other elements so it is never found on earth as a pure element. If you were traveling through galactic space then pure hydrogen would be a good thing to look for but not here.

On earth we have to dislodge hydrogen from some other elements to get it into a form we can use as fuel for a fuel cell. Most hydrogen on earth is in the form of dihydrogen oxide or in other words, water.

Hydrogen binds very tightly to oxygen so to separate them takes a lot of energy. And that is the point. Once the energy is put into separating the hydrogen and oxygen it can be recovered by combining them back together as long as you do it in the right way.

Since oxygen is readily available in the atmosphere, thanks to our green friends and the sun, it is not necessary to keep it around, like it would be on a space ship.

Hydrogen can also be extracted from any hydrocarbon, carbohydrate, alcohol and many other hydrogen bearing materials. Typically this is less energy intensive and therefore cheaper. The down side is that it leaves behind lots of carbon that has to be disposed of some way or other.

Carbon can be burnt with oxygen to make carbon dioxide and a bunch of heat. The heat can be used to make more hydrogen. That much is fine but then the carbon becomes the new super-pollutant CO2.

Climate change is a certainty. It has always been changing. The climate has never been static. The issue is the speed of change and the consensus is that it is happening faster than we would like. The main culprit is supposed to be CO2. Any new energy technology has to address this issue or it will face a lot more problems then the technical issues. Hydrogen from fossil fuels is out.

The real energy potential of hydrogen is as a fusion material. All of my life I have heard that in 50 years hydrogen fusion will take over all energy production. I'm 66 now and they are still saying it will be 50 years.

Until fusion becomes a real thing we have to do something else and so we are. I never though the Columbia river gorge would ever be lined with wind turbines but it is today. Solar cells are becoming more practical all of the time. Geothermal is what runs Iceland.

The trouble with all of this is that none of it compares to the utility of fossil fuels. You just can't go down the freeway with a 200KW wind turbine on your car. We need a way to store the energy we capture so that it can be used in mobile transportation.

Both batteries and hydrogen store that energy in a way that it can be used to haul an RV. The issues that remain are cost, range, durability, safety, availability and maybe a few more. Most of those issues are better addressed by batteries than by hydrogen.

[mizterwizard]

Originally Posted by Italian Tow

Well you have convinced me! So its best to continue down the battery path tell we deplete those resources then to take those resources and try to utilize hydrogen (work the bugs out) Or hydrogen should just be scraped?

Hydrogen will always have its uses as an energy storage medium but I don't think it will become viable as an automotive fuel. Sources are never exactly depleted. What happens is that they become so scarce they are too expensive to use for what we used to use them for.

An example is whale oil. People used to use it for all sorts of things including burning in oil lamps. It is really good stuff. Except not so much from the whale's point of view. Today whale oil is so limited in its availability that it costs too much for any ordinary use. You have to really want some to be able to afford it and then you probably have to "know someone" to get it.

Some day fossil fuels would become like that but long before that happens we will stop using them because of the environmental impact. I'm not an environmentalist. It is just the practical reality of the situation. After all, it's not like we don't know where there are whales or have forgotten how to catch them. We have just decided we would rather have whales than whale oil. Someday we will decide we would like to have other things than fossil fuels.

Eventually we are going to have to switch to energy sources that are both economical and harmless. In my mind nuclear is the only thing that will be able to fully fill the energy needs of humanity. Many would disagree but after much consideration that is the conclusion I have come to.

[Brian B-P]

Originally Posted by mizterwizard

In my mind nuclear is the only thing that will be able to fully fill the energy needs of humanity. Many would disagree but after much consideration that is the conclusion I have come to.

Assuming that's nuclear fission, then I suppose the reasoning is that uranium mining is very bad but you don't have to do a great deal of it, and nuclear waste is horrible but the amount is small, and the consequences of incidents are horrendous but they don't happen very often. Nuclear power is a major source of electricity in Ontario, New Brunswick, some parts of the eastern U.S., and some other countries, notably Japan (although much less now after their disasters) and France. It's not growing - most North American nuclear plants are very old. If you really don't like nuclear power, you might not want to get an electric vehicle in much of North America.

Even if nuclear power is the solution, this still leaves the problem of carrying energy around, since nuclear fission reactors are too big for personal vehicles, and so we would still need to have the electric F-150 or an alternative.

Of course the real solution is Mr. Fusion, providing nuclear fusion (instead of fission) in a tidy and portable form. That was supposed to appear by 2015...

[mizterwizard]

Originally Posted by Brian B-P

Assuming that's nuclear fission, then I suppose the reasoning is that uranium mining is very bad but you don't have to do a great deal of it, and nuclear waste is horrible but the amount is small, and the consequences of incidents are horrendous but they don't happen very often. Nuclear power is a major source of electricity in Ontario, New Brunswick, some parts of the eastern U.S., and some other countries, notably Japan (although much less now after their disasters) and France. It's not growing - most North American nuclear plants are very old. If you really don't like nuclear power, you might not want to get an electric vehicle in much of North America.

Even if nuclear power is the solution, this still leaves the problem of carrying energy around, since nuclear fission reactors are too big for personal vehicles, and so we would still need to have the electric F-150 or an alternative.

Of course the real solution is Mr. Fusion, providing nuclear fusion (instead of fission) in a tidy and portable form. That was supposed to appear by 2015...

I'd go for that but like I said above, fusion is perpetually 50 years away.

I am not in favor of uranium based nuclear fission. Neither is anyone else who doesn't want to build bombs. The only reason that we do uranium is because it produces bomb materials.

An uranium reactor is loaded with 20 years worth of fuel at startup. Initially it is so hot the the control rods have to be almost fully inserted to keep it under control. As the fuel ages it becomes less reactive until near the end of their cycle the control rods are almost fully retracted. Even at that point there is so much fuel in the reactor that it is highly susceptible to accidents. It's interesting to note that Chernobyl happened as the reactor was being shut down for maintenance and refueling.

Since we have decided to not recycle reactor fuel, most of the radioactive material that was initially put into the reactor come out at the end of the fuel cycle and is discarded. It is terribly wasteful but it is supposed to prevent nuclear proliferation. There are much more sensible uranium reactor designs but we don't use them for political reasons.

A reactor based on thorium is a much better design. There is never more than a few days worth of fuel in the reactor at any one time. Thorium that is not in the reactor is not reactive. It has to be irradiated in the reactor to become fissionable. It can't melt down because it melts by design. If it manages to run wild, which would be pretty hard to arrange, it will just destroy the reaction chamber, not the whole countryside.

There is a lot more thorium around than uranium, by several orders of magnitude. It is cheap, easy to find, abundant, wide spread (no thorium OPEC), safe until reacted and almost impossible to make a bomb out of. That is why we don't have any thorium reactors today. You can't make a bomb with them.

Furthermore, a thorium reactor can accept waste from other reactors and turn it into non-harmful, non-radioactive waste. It is projected that more than 95% of all existing nuclear waste could be deactivated in a thorium reactor. It would take a long time but a lot faster than 28,000 years.

Nuclear looks bad only if you look at what we are currently doing. It looks good if you consider what it could be. It wouldn't take 50 years either.

So nuclear is the answer (in my mind) to where the power will come from. The other question is how to transport it and that is where the debate between hydrogen and batteries comes in. Because there is so much less radioactive material in a thorium reactor it can be a lot smaller and lighter than an uranium reactor but I doubt it will ever be possible to directly power a car with any nuclear device.

Now, a star ship is another matter.

[John in Santa Cruz]

it would rock if they ever sort out nuclear FUSION power... but I've had several physicists tell me, its a much harder problem than you might think.... while our Sun, like all stars, is a massive fusion reaction, its actually very low efficiency, and only works because its so incredibly huge beyond all our imagination. fusion on a small scale is really really hard to achieve.

fun fact, when the San Diego Fusion Center's grant money ran out and they had to wind down, the Chinese came in, and bought everything, all the research data, design engineering, etc, and are using that knowlege towards building the next generation much bigger fusion test reactor in China using what we learned in San Diego..

[mizterwizard]

Originally Posted by John in Santa Cruz

it would rock if they ever sort out nuclear FUSION power... but I've had several physicists tell me, its a much harder problem than you might think.... while our Sun, like all stars, is a massive fusion reaction, its actually very low efficiency, and only works because its so incredibly huge beyond all our imagination. fusion on a small scale is really really hard to achieve.

fun fact, when the San Diego Fusion Center's grant money ran out and they had to wind down, the Chinese came in, and bought everything, all the research data, design engineering, etc, and are using that knowlege towards building the next generation much bigger fusion test reactor in China using what we learned in San Diego..

Fusion takes 3 things, time, density and temperature, which is the same thing as speed on an atomic scale. If you have a lot of time and density then you don't need as much temperature. If the temperature is really high then you don't need much time or density. If the density is really high then you need less time and temperature.

In the sun there is lots of time. It's something on the order of 3.5 billion years so far. The density at the sun's center is very high. Therefore it doesn't need to be all that hot. With low temperature you have to wait until atoms hit almost directly head on before they will fuse and that is what the sun does. With lots of density there are more collisions so there are more chances for direct head on collisions.

Actually the sun is perfectly efficient at what it does. Thank goodness it isn't speedier though or we would all fry.

If you have less time, say a few nanoseconds, then you have to have even more density or a lot more speed/temperature. In a hydrogen bomb fusion takes place inside an atomic bomb so it is pretty hot. The nuclear explosion is also used to compress the hydrogen so density is higher than you might think.

Now let's look at something you wouldn't mind having under your hood. You can't have the density of a stellar core or nuclear bomb explosion. You can't wait billions of years either. So you have to have really big speed/temperature. It's pretty easy to get a single hydrogen nucleus to go really fast. A good scientist can do it on a lab bench. But to get lots of them to go fast and hit each other is really hard. Protons are really small. Some pretty smart people have been working on it for their whole careers and haven't gotten very far.

[Italian Tow]

Holly molly, this is all soo interesting but soo far from me that without a degree in one of the sciences makes it very hard to understand. I must say that I've been schooled, I've learned more from these few post/interactions then I would have ever had, had I set out in search of... Thank you! "the things you learn on a trailer forum"

[Brian B-P]

Originally Posted by mizterwizard

An uranium reactor is loaded with 20 years worth of fuel at startup. Initially it is so hot the the control rods have to be almost fully inserted to keep it under control. As the fuel ages it becomes less reactive until near the end of their cycle the control rods are almost fully retracted. Even at that point there is so much fuel in the reactor that it is highly susceptible to accidents.
...
There are much more sensible uranium reactor designs but we don't use them for political reasons.

This description of a uranium fusion reactor matches some of designs used in the U.S., which were derived from the reactors designed to power submarines; I think they're fundamentally scary, and much more controllable designs exist.

Politics is certainly key here. One of the much better designs is that used in Canada; of course that doesn't sell well in the U.S. CANDU reactors are continuously refuelled, and stop reacting if the (heavy water) coolant is lost. We haven't melted any of them down, yet.

Regardless of the reactor design, I agree that the basic idea of using the fission of uranium-235 certainly has lots of issues.

Originally Posted by mizterwizard

A reactor based on thorium is a much better design. There is never more than a few days worth of fuel in the reactor at any one time. Thorium that is not in the reactor is not reactive. It has to be irradiated in the reactor to become fissionable. It can't melt down because it melts by design. If it manages to run wild, which would be pretty hard to arrange, it will just destroy the reaction chamber, not the whole countryside.

There is a lot more thorium around than uranium, by several orders of magnitude. It is cheap, easy to find, abundant, wide spread (no thorium OPEC), safe until reacted and almost impossible to make a bomb out of. That is why we don't have any thorium reactors today. You can't make a bomb with them.

Furthermore, a thorium reactor can accept waste from other reactors and turn it into non-harmful, non-radioactive waste. It is projected that more than 95% of all existing nuclear waste could be deactivated in a thorium reactor.

If only it were that easy. Thorium is mildly radioactive, but the primary isotope (Th-232) is not fissile; it is transmuted to uranium-233 (via Th-233 and Pa-233) in a reactor, and the U-233 fuels the fission reaction... so thorium as nuclear fuel doesn't avoid uranium at all, although it starts from different mined ores. Cycles using thorium are complex and have their own issues; it's not just that they can use waste from other reactors - they require it. There is a lot of processing involved in any thorium-based nuclear fuel system.


For the average person - anyone who doesn't understand what an "isotope" is - this is all gobbledygook. I think that's okay; a key point to this sort of discussion is that there are no easy answers to energy problems. There is not now, and never will be, a way to get energy without substantial consequences of many kinds. Electric vehicle enthusiasts often ignore that reality, and by putting on blinders so they see only the very last stage of energy use, they declare themselves "green" and harmless to the environment.

[John in Santa Cruz]

this book, written by a retired nuclear engineer, was a fascinating look at the history of reactors and such, from the perspective of the accidents.
https://www.amazon.com/Atomic-Accide.../dp/B00HVPI1IA

the author happens to be a regular poster on an email list I'm on concerning older Mercedes cars.

also this book by the same author...
https://www.amazon.com/Atomic-Advent.../dp/B01MYNQLZX

[Mike Lewis]

Originally Posted by Brian B-P

Politics is certainly key here. One of the much better designs is that used in Canada; of course that doesn't sell well in the U.S. CANDU reactors are continuously refuelled, and stop reacting if the (heavy water) coolant is lost. We haven't melted any of them down, yet.

If I recall correctly, India used a CANDU reactor to get the fissionable material for its first nuclear bomb back in 1974.

I have recently become more optimistic about fusion reactors. One reason is a major US defense contractor is working on one. It's physically small enough to put on a ship; i.e. the Navy wants it. There is at least one privately-funded small reactor project as well. I think one of these will be successful before that big fusion reactor being built in France-- ITER, I think.

[mizterwizard]

One never knows how far into the science is sufficient on a forum such as this. I am well aware of the conversion to uranium that has to happen in a thorium reactor for it to work and that it needs a startup charge of fissionable material to get it going. Also, if it is shut down for more than a couple of weeks it will need to be restarted. U-233 from thorium does not have the same decay profile as U-235 though and will spontaneously decay away much sooner.

After startup it isn't necessary to use waste from other reactors but doing so can deactivate the waste, improving our storage situation. There is some residual radioactivity that a thorium reactor can't eliminate and that would have to be stored but it is small in comparison to what you get from U-235.

All materials are radioactive on some scale. Recent experiments have been conducted to measured proton decay and everything has protons. Radioactivity comes in 3 broad categorizes. The really hot stuff would be really dangerous but there just isn't any of it around because it has a short half life so it is nothing to worry about. U-233 and plutonium 238 fall into this category. The very low radioactive materials are so harmless that you will die of something else long before it will hurt you. Thorium is in this category as well as U-238. Stuff that has a half life of a few thousand years is the danger. It is active enough to kill and durable enough to have lots of it around. U-235 is like this along with lots of stuff made in reactors.

And all of this has nothing to do with RVing, not even boondocking so why am I discussing it here?

[Italian Tow]

Well we were talking about the electric F150 and I remember making a comment about battery and fuel about 30 or 40 threads ago. Which brings us here... NOW! I can go Rving...

[War Eagle]

Does anyone remember what George Jetson used to power his flying "Space Car?" It seems like a lot of futuristic things in comic strips and TV cartoons came/come true in time. Dick Tracey's watch was way ahead of its time. I'm thinking a flying "Space RV" might be in our future, and this thread has me already concerned about how to fuel it! And just when gasoline was getting affordable again. Anyway, just quandering a bit while waiting for the next Alabama blizzard to hit....

[Italian Tow]

O no please, no more thoughts about nuclear reactors, fusion, isotopes and the likes. I have become numb just keeping up (which I have not been able to). As far as George, we did not have a TV then (we were to busy pretending) so without a google search I'll guess "human waste". I believe Michigan is down stream from this storm so we get hit tomorrow. Almost forgot, Conspiracy, I think Hollywood has more insight about our future then we think. The movie "The day after tomorrow" with Dennis Quaid came out (what seems like a few years before) as a warring to the east coast before that massive storm hit! Scary!

[Brian B-P]

Originally Posted by Italian Tow

Well we were talking about the electric F150 and I remember making a comment about battery and fuel about 30 or 40 threads ago. Which brings us here...

Exactly. Electric vehicles are only desirable because they consume electricity instead of fuel, so where we get electricity and fuel is very relevant to choosing an electric vehicle or not. The question was raised in post #3, although responses didn't start until post #11.

Of course, anyone who is not interested doesn't need to follow the thread. The majority of threads in any forum are not really of interest to most of the people in the forum; fortunately, the threads have titles... If this is a problem, maybe a moderator can change this thread's title to "Electric F-150 and where do we get the energy?"

Originally Posted by War Eagle

Does anyone remember what George Jetson used to power his flying "Space Car?" It seems like a lot of futuristic things in comic strips and TV cartoons came/come true in time. Dick Tracey's watch was way ahead of its time. I'm thinking a flying "Space RV" might be in our future, and this thread has me already concerned about how to fuel it!

But seriously, the "futuristic things" which have come true are mostly related to information technology, because information doesn't have a physical size (ignoring quantum effects for this purpose) and doesn't involve doing physical work. The things that don't come true are those involving energy and the movement of physical mass. So we have watch-sized phones, but not the Mr. Fusion power reactor; we have the technology for aircraft to pilot themselves, but not Jetson's car that lifts and propels itself without an engine or wings or propellers.

The endless promise of personal "flying cars" has been around so long that it's a standing joke. Magazines such as Popular Mechanics have even done articles about the many times they featured "almost here" or "coming in year XXXX" flying cars, and the fact that they never appear.

[Mike Lewis]

Well, another perpetually promised technology was a flat screen TV that you could hang on the wall like a picture. I had heard this prediction for my entire life. This one finally came true, so maybe it's time to be optimistic about fusion power and flying cars.

[War Eagle]

Originally Posted by Mike Lewis

Well, another perpetually promised technology was a flat screen TV that you could hang on the wall like a picture. I had heard this prediction for my entire life. This one finally came true, so maybe it's time to be optimistic about fusion power and flying cars.

With that in mind, I'll keep holding out for a Star Trek transporter large enough for our Escape 21 - no tow vehicle required!

[Donna D.]

Originally Posted by War Eagle

With that in mind, I'll keep holding out for a Star Trek transporter large enough for our Escape 21 - no tow vehicle required!

But, but... that would only get us from point A to point B. What about the journey