Scratch “escape” above and substitute “next move.”

You know…

go easy…step lightly…stay free.

If not, ask Dennis. He knows…and I doubt he’ll rat me out.

Do you know what I was doing in 1998 and 1999? I’ve written about it, but perhaps those were comments you missed.

I remember a time (early in 2000) when Cisco was worth more than GE. When the Controller mentioned it to me, I laughed and told him he should sell. By then, I was planning my escape…to California.

What a smile.

Wind power still suffers from the storage problem. It is not reliable baseload. Even having lots of wind farms doesn’t solve the problem. Allow me to bring out my meteorology background here and wave it like your RO credentials. Wind will halp with additional load, but very little with baseload. It is limited. There are limits to where you can put wind farms, so the total power from them has an upper bound. As I understand it, wind is booming now because recent improvements in turbines has significantly reduced maintenance costs. Hence the good spots are growing turbines. I also believe that tax credits and force purchase rules in most states have seriously distorted the wind power market. And I can’t wait until the bird enviros cross swords in a serious way with the wind farm folks. Ain’t enough wind power out there to do the job.

Plutonium – My comments hold. I don’t give a damn if a repository has bomb grade plutonium or just nasty radionuclides of other sorts. Same problem, same issue. Pu can be viewed as a pollutant or a bomb component. #1 is true of other isotopes in the mix. #2 should not be an interesting issue in requiring 10,000 year storage. What was mankind like 10,000 years ago? 1000 years ago? Putting 10,000 year limits on localized radiation storage is simply ridiculous given the rapid pace of change. Maybe in 100 years they will use the neutron flux of fusion reactors to just “burn’ the radionuclides from the waste, as one example.

Insurance – Feds Provide. Liability limit. Systems built in fortresses. Since so far no civilian power reactor of decent design has harmed anyone with radiation, this shouldn’t be a problem. If it is, fix it with legislation.

See other posts about variable valves. They are doing them now.

Regarding engineering, I do that. I’ve done a lot more in the past – primarily electrical engineering. Supercapacitors have been talked about for a long time. Heck, I’ve got a 1F capacitor in my junk box – about thimble sized. But with capacitors you have the issue of area, distance between the plates and dielectric (if you use it). Have fun.

If you can figure out how to make a megajoule capacitor that is a significant improvement, go get some money and do so. Capacitors are less desirable from a power conversion point than batteries, but heck, anything that has the right power density and cost is interesting in transportation. So far, the best way to store energy is chemicals that you burn, producing heat – say, gasoline.

I think I mentioned the bad environment under the hood. Because of the need for higher power devices, future internal combustion cars in the US are going to higher voltage (42V I think). The rest is well understood. Those who design for cars know the environmental conditions well – they haven’t changed and they won’t change much (except for main power voltage, and din some system a change in power glitch characteristics).

You can’t buy commercial catastrophic insurance for commercial nukes.

There is a reason for this. Although the risk may be small (and with so few accidents we have no idea what the real risk is), the payouts are potentially very large.

Again the French program is a government program. Because only government can absorb the risk.

The good thing is – given the risks and popular aversion – we have wind coming along to fill the gap.

In the end until you can change a lot of minds about nukes no more commercial nukes bought by utilities at market price are going to happen.

Well any way even if you could get people to buy into nukes you have not solved the Plutonium proliferation problem. Given the current state of the world I consider that a show stopper.

As you know I’m an ex-Naval RO. I know nukes. I’m also familiar with pebble beds and the French system.

1. The 10,000 year rule for me is not about radiation – that, as you point out, is stupid. I’m talking strictly bomb grade Plutonium. Plutonium has a 1/2 life of 24,000 years. So my 10,000 year watch is probably short by a million years or two.

2. Economics – look at the cost curve for wind. Every doubling of turbine size lowers the electrical cost by 1/3. In 15 years new nuke and coal plants will be non-competitive at their inceptiion. In other words as we get the nuclear technical factors under control economics is coming along to kill thte industry. The big electrical power generators in America are buying wind. The market for nukes is not there. BTW you haven’t answered the insurance question.

photon c,

You can’t do variable valves with out an integrated starter/generator capable of about 5KW output. Electrically operated valves are very power hungry. In other words it can’t just be slapped on an engine. A whole lot of things need to chane to make it possible.

Such change takes time.

Most of the belt driven accessories in the engine compartment will be replaced with elctric motors. It is going to take time. The engine compartment of an auto is a very difficult design environment. First you have the temperature extremes. Then shock and vibration.

99.9% of the people have no idea how hard it is to design for this environment. The .1% who do understand have disagreement about what to do and when. Well at least the .1% can be swayed by numbers and economics.

The technology missing to make batteries possible is economical large super capacitors. I have some ideas on how to make this happen. Contact me if you have $200k to spend and want to start a car company.

When people say we have been doing storage batteries for cars for 20 or 50 years they are totally wrong. It is actually around 100 years of work. The cheapest technology is still lead/acid. With NiCd catching up. The chemistry limitations are daunting. And the high energy/light weight chemistries (Lithium) are very dangerous in an accident. Batteries as an auxiliary power source (burst energy) is somewhat workable in conjunction with super capacitors. It is unlikely they will ever be viable as an automotive energy storage medium (the 300 mile – 5 minute recharge battery).

It all comes down to this: every one wants to be an engineer. Very few want to study engineering. Ambition all out of proportion to expertise.

What part of hybrid technology are vulnerable to seriouscost reductions as volumes go up? The power control modules. The stuff that handles the KWs. Other wise most of the technology (including the computer controls) is pretty mature.

Once volumes get above 10K units per year cost reductions are quite difficult. They will happen. It will be a long slow painful process. Part of it is that power electronics are still on a steep learning curve. With the advent of silicon carbide and diamond based transistors things should get much better in terms of weight and volume – but today those are exotic technologies and will not be mass market commercially viable for 10 to 30 years.

If you have $200K to spare I have a few (very profitable – $$billions) patentable ideas for speeding it up.

Contact me.

I don’t know what the economies of scale are. Obviously the algorithms that determine what the various computers involved do have development costs and those will be spread out somewhat as hybrid technology expands. But it’s also true that the software will have to be modified for each new car and application since no two car models are identical and every variation in significant equipment (manual or automatic transmission or, say, the additional weight of a sunroof if it bumps the car to a new weight class) could entail re-tailoring the software.

I don’t think the great expense in hybrids right now comes in the electric motors either, but agree that it’s likely in the batteries. I don’t know this for sure however, but it seems that’s what the engineers hint at (every company wants to keep their costs secret naturally). I guess this is a time-will-tell item.

Variable valve timing will eventually (but soon) be on every new internal combustion engine in some form, I think. Toyota is proud of the fact that in 2005 it’s used on every engine they sell here (it’s new on the Tundra’s V8) and Honda’s been selling nothing but VTEC-equipped vehicles for a few years now. The effectiveness of variable valve timing is such that it will be universally adopted and that about says it all.

In fact I can’t think of a single manufacturer that doesn’t have a variable valve timing system of some sort on at least one model. Maybe KIA? I haven’t looked lately.

Transmission technology has developed nearly as quickly as engine controls have lately. There are automatic manual transmissions, manually shiftable automatics, sequential manuals, continuously variable (CVT) automatics… My belief is that they’ll all have a place on vehicles in the immediate future as they’re applied in the appropriate places. Low torque loads and lower-power hybrid drivetrains seem to work well with CVTs for instance as in the Honda Civic hybrid. Meanwhile BMW has adopted a seven-speed sequential gearbox for the new 500-horsepower M5. Ultimately there’s no one true transmission for every application.

Alternate fuels will be necessary for automobiles if CO2 emission is a real problem (and in spite of the poor state of anthropogenic global warming science, I suspect it may be). Otherwise, it may be practical to reform other hydrocarbons into gasoline (or kerosene or other hydrocarbon high energy density fuels).

None of this logic justifies the CARB’s decision to reduce CO2 emissions. It does affect local pollution in any way. The sensitivity of the world climate system to California’s CO2 emissions is almost certainly microscopic. As someone pointed out, the regulation is actually a disguised CAFE regulation, probably with the hope that some useful technology will come out of it. It is California enviroweenies deciding (through market power) what is best for all of us – in an area rampant with pseudoscience, and in a manner that any engineer would consider absurd (as I do). Oh well, it’ll just outsource a bunch of jobs. A bunch of leftist enviroweenies will leave CA and move here to AZ, bringing their silly ideas with them. Or maybe the jobs will vanish, as the Japanese, who already have a market that likes small cars, increase their market share.

M Simon

I don’t accept your reasoning on why commercial nuclear power won’t work. First, ask France about it – it works there. Then, consider doing it right instead of the silly way it was done in the US. Use inherently safe designs, such as pebble beds. Put lots of plants in a fortresses… if Pantex can guard its plutonium, it should be possible to design nuclear facilities with security in mind from the start.

Insure radiation responsibly. There has never been a significant or hazardous radiation release in the US from a commercial reactor, and that’s with poorly designed control systems (partly due to overly long NRC design review cycles) and operators that screwed up royally.

Too many behave as if any radiation is dangerous (and then they smoke a cigarette – Polonium – or go skiing – UV and dramatically increased cosmic radiation – or get on an airplane – like skiing, but no UV and a lot more cosmic radiation). I once took my geiger counter (digital) on a Southwest Flight. The thing was literally off the scale at cruise altitude.

Rods are in cooling ponds because political factors (ironically, from environmentalists)which are keeping them from being either reprocessed (for a Pu cycle) or buried in Yucca mountain. BTW, I believe it is possible to poison reactor fuel to make weapons grade Pu extraction much harder – there are several Pu isotopes and they are not all suitable, so you drive weapons makers into isotopic separation which is the same problem as using Uranium.

If you think the 10,000 year requirement for nuclear burial is reasonable, you are more pessimistic than I am. Who are we protecting in 10000 years – remnant hunter-gatherers? The 10,000 year rule is silly.

In other words, if one approaches the problem with an intent to make it work, a willingness to use some modern thinking on the problem, and a skepticism of some of the alleged problem, it gets a lot easier to make power producing fission reactors.

Finally, recognize that the biggest problem for the nuclear industry is the vast government regulation, much of it unnecessary, resulting from environmental activists, and resulting enormous costs and delays.

I’m an engineer. I don’t have a lot of respect for governmental and pressure groups that incidently do engineering as part of their activities. That is what CARB is doing.

1)To what extent to you think that the elements of hybrid technology are subject to economies of scale…ie, if millions of these vehicles were being sold every year, what happens to the cost premium? Off the bat, I wouldn’t expect much improvement in the cost of the electric motors and generator, since these things have been manufactured in high volume for over a century…but maybe the batteries and control systems?

2)What do you see as the significant of the variable-valve technology, which eliminates throttling losses and seems to improve overall mileage by about 5-10%? (Being sold by BMW under the name “Valvetronic”(tm)). I don’t understand why there aren’t more auto manufacturers getting on board with this.

3)Ditto for the sequential automatic transmissions (basically, computer-controlled manuals), which could shave off another 5-10%.