The past two years have made me much more supportive of nuclear power and other technologies

[Neapolitan Ice Cream]

I like the idea of hydro and tidal power. Put a tidal plant across most of your biggest rivers and you get HUGE amounts of clean energy. Sadly such plants wreak havoc on our fragile ecosystems...

 

[Starport Seven-Five]

When anti-icing systems are installed, they can fail when weather conditions knock out existing power supplies because they rely on the grid to work in the first place.

Seems like those systems should have a battery backup? Pretty easy fix.

Another downside is that blades which do not have an ice-prevention system installed may need to be stopped temporarily while cold temperatures pass. Jian Wang, a professor of aircraft technology and his team at London's Kingston University said doing so "introduces safety hazards where big chunks of ice falling off the blade could present a hazard to people in and around wind farms".

A car on summer tires doesn't drive very well in the snow either. That doesn't mean cars don't work in snow.

There is no perfect energy source and we are certainly not at a point in this country to give up fossil fuels which can be cleaner, cheaper, better for the environment, and more efficient than other energy sources.

I have never made that argument nor do I remember anyone in the thread stating that. Our power grid will always be a mixture of sources.

And I remember a few years back when the same celebrities who claim to want clean energy, fought hard to not have a wind farm on Martha’s Vineyard. They take up a lot of lane which isn’t plentiful in some areas and not everyone wants to look at them in their backyard.

And it was ultimately built: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/04/climate/vineyard-wind-massachusetts.html

As far as not wanting to look at them... too bad. There are lot of things I don't like looking at but unless I own the land I don't get much of a say in it. That's life.

 

[LuvOrlando]

So this happened, guess how long the half life is for Carbon -14?

https://news.yahoo.com/not-just-toxic-chemicals-radioactive-130021218.html

Radioactive waste does what it does regardless of its stated purpose and it is expensive to deal with, even the best half-a&^ed solution is pricey and going to cause bad actors to be tempted to just dump it like this.

Math on the HALF LIFE of Carbon 14 found in the ocean, in case anyone is counting, assuming it was dumped in 1950 is:
5730 years - 74 years since 1950, so only 5,656 years for half of this death substance to go sooo....

https://www.epa.gov/radiation/radio... emission,emitted can include alpha particles

 

[Neapolitan Ice Cream]

Another good source of power is Hydrogen, clean and effective. Until recently it has been tricky to source Hydrogen, but recently, huge deposits of the substance have been discovered underground...

 

[Dakota731]

Seems like those systems should have a battery backup? Pretty easy fix.

A car on summer tires doesn't drive very well in the snow either. That doesn't mean cars don't work in snow.

I have never made that argument nor do I remember anyone in the thread stating that. Our power grid will always be a mixture of sources.

And it was ultimately built: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/04/climate/vineyard-wind-massachusetts.html

As far as not wanting to look at them... too bad. There are lot of things I don't like looking at but unless I own the land I don't get much of a say in it. That's life.

Often it is someone’s lane but the government takes it anyway. It’s kind of hard to put wind farms in the middle of the urban cities who use the most power in our country.
And just what we need more lithium batteries to have to dispose of, destroy the environment mining for and worry about exploding. If only everything was so easy to solve …

 

[LuvOrlando]

Another good source of power is Hydrogen, clean and effective. Until recently it has been tricky to source Hydrogen, but recently, huge deposits of the substance have been discovered underground...

Unless something has changed Hydrogen power requires a Nuclear Power Plant and will generate Radioactive Waste.

Remember Hiroshima, Japan that was Hydrogen.

A rose by any other name and all that

When the word clean is used by proponents I suppose there is a focus on air being clean, as in Nuclear Power doesn't have exhaust fumes like smoke. However, by no stretch is nuclear waste environmentally clean considering radioactive waste. I mean Nuclear Energy has had a great marketing campaign as long as no-one looks too long.

 

[Neapolitan Ice Cream]

Unless something has changed Hydrogen power requires a Nuclear Power Plant and will generate Radioactive Waste.

Remember Hiroshima, Japan that was Hydrogen.

A rose by any other name and all that

Not the same thing here - simply burn Hydrogen and you get heat plus water. The problem is, it's not easy to source Hydrogen, but now, scientists think they've found massive reserves of the gas deep in the ground. I read about it in the New Scientist. Will try and find you a link.

[EDIT] - https://www.newscientist.com/articl...does-earth-contain-near-limitless-clean-fuel/

 

[BrianL]

Unless something has changed Hydrogen power requires a Nuclear Power Plant and will generate Radioactive Waste.

Remember Hiroshima, Japan that was Hydrogen.

A rose by any other name and all that

Hydrogen Fuel Cells are not nuclear. They use a chemical reaction and are not the same as the atomic weapons called "Hydrogen Bombs."

 

[_19disnA]

You can also produce hydrogen from an electrical reaction with water. You might recall doing that in h.s. or college chemistry class. Whether it is cost effective to scale up for the amount needed is a different issue. However, it is highly flammable (i.e. Hindenburg) so safely storing/distributing also involves various technical challenges (and added costs).

 

[LuvOrlando]

You can also produce hydrogen from an electrical reaction with water. You might recall doing that in h.s. or college chemistry class. Whether it is cost effective to scale up for the amount needed is a different issue. However, it is highly flammable (i.e. Hindenburg) so safely storing/distributing also involves various technical challenges (and added costs).

I'm not so sure when Hydrogen Power is brought up it is this, but like maybe, could be... I guess I'll need to pay much closer attention to the buzz in the news, the flavor of the month changes like flocks of birds in the sky these days.

 

[Starport Seven-Five]

You can also produce hydrogen from an electrical reaction with water. You might recall doing that in h.s. or college chemistry class. Whether it is cost effective to scale up for the amount needed is a different issue. However, it is highly flammable (i.e. Hindenburg) so safely storing/distributing also involves various technical challenges (and added costs).

Producing hydrogen through electrolysis is just a way to store the energy... and a relatively ineffective storage method at that. Hydrogen has a very low energy density so it is generally stored in a highly compressed state which requires further energy. And at the end of the day you just have a flammable gas that either needs to be burned or converted back into electricity.

I studied hydrogen pretty heavily about 15 years ago (due to hydrogen fuel cells being an interesting technology for automotive) and the summary in automotive was that the well to wheels efficiency of a hydrogen fuel cell car using fuel generated by electrolysis is ~30% where a battery EV (BEV) is ~80%. This means that you would need to generate almost 3x the electricity for transportation to support a country using hydrogen fuel cell vehicles when compared to a BEV. In a nation with already shaky electric infrastructure it's probably better to stick with BEVs or even PHEVs. There are also issues with rare earth metals that are used in fuel cells and the entire refueling infrastructure needing to be converted to hydrogen that makes it unattractive.

IMO the only people excited about hydrogen powered vehicles are the oil companies because it's a fuel you cannot generate easily at home. If they can convince us to adopt hydrogen fuel cell powered vehicles it will tie us to refueling stations for another century.

 

[_19disnA]

Mostly I was replying to that other person who seemed to be confusing hydrogen power with nuclear bombs. Using hydrogen as a source of enegy can be appropriate in some applications. With all of these things you have to look at the cost/efficiency to see if using it on a large scale makes sense. Even if some huge underground reserves of hydrogen have been located, there are still a number of technical issues to deal with to use it as a source of energy.