@Caleb James DeLisle
Don't Follow Me.
(See pinned post)
DeltaChat: http://dc.cjd.pkt.wiki/
Relays (1)
- wss://relay.ditto.pub – read & write
Recent Notes
Swinging by a "Rewrite <30 year old unix util> In Rust" repository and leaving a comment...
I love youtube chemists. "Can't" really is just a state of mind...
Nice video about the challenges with thorium molten salt reactors: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f-0Vs3D2a9g
* Salts are highly corrosive to the metal, particularly impurities in the salt (such as water)
* And if you try to thicken the metal and/or use a highly robust metal, it soaks up your neutrons
* And neutron economy is On The Knife Edge, if everything is not *perfect*, you lose enough neutrons that you don't breed enough thorium to keep your reactor running
* And even the lithium salt contains some lithium-6 which soaks up a ton of neutrons and kills the reaction...
They're planning around a price point that is competitive with fossil fuels, which is cool, but solar is a lot cheaper than fossil (assuming you can handle unreliable generation)...
So a really good question is whether they're going to manage to get cheaper than renewables + storage. I suspect they eventually will - at scale - but if storage significantly improves then renewables will be nipping at their heels...
* Salts are highly corrosive to the metal, particularly impurities in the salt (such as water)
* And if you try to thicken the metal and/or use a highly robust metal, it soaks up your neutrons
* And neutron economy is On The Knife Edge, if everything is not *perfect*, you lose enough neutrons that you don't breed enough thorium to keep your reactor running
* And even the lithium salt contains some lithium-6 which soaks up a ton of neutrons and kills the reaction...
They're planning around a price point that is competitive with fossil fuels, which is cool, but solar is a lot cheaper than fossil (assuming you can handle unreliable generation)...
So a really good question is whether they're going to manage to get cheaper than renewables + storage. I suspect they eventually will - at scale - but if storage significantly improves then renewables will be nipping at their heels...
> AI bubble pops
> ten quadrillion gas turbines sitting idle
> depreciation.jpg
> anything is better than nothing
> every molecule of natural gas gets burned to make electricity
> electricity gets hella-cheap
Maybe ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
> ten quadrillion gas turbines sitting idle
> depreciation.jpg
> anything is better than nothing
> every molecule of natural gas gets burned to make electricity
> electricity gets hella-cheap
Maybe ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
After 30 or so Sunday Energy Posts, I'm zeroing in on Sodium-Water (NaOH) batteries as the energy storage of the future.
Still there's problems to solve, but 1kg of sodium is worth about 2-3 kWh of power, this kind of energy density is unheard-of in anything else. Even lithium batteries have a task to beat 0.5.
Sodium metal melts at 99C which is very convenient, lower than the boiling point of water. But this is also convenient because it means the metal is solid in any realistic outside temperature, so if make sodium metal, you could paint it with wax and stack it like firewood.
On the other side, NaOH (sodium hydroxide, or caustic soda, or lye) is also pretty easy to store. And the reactant to make NaOH out of sodium metal is water.
This wouldn't be the kind of battery that is set-it-and-forget-it like an EV battery, more of a sodium reactor - you dump solid sodium in the hopper, it melts and runs down into the cells, it converts to sodium hydroxide, and it makes power.
Still there's problems to solve, but 1kg of sodium is worth about 2-3 kWh of power, this kind of energy density is unheard-of in anything else. Even lithium batteries have a task to beat 0.5.
Sodium metal melts at 99C which is very convenient, lower than the boiling point of water. But this is also convenient because it means the metal is solid in any realistic outside temperature, so if make sodium metal, you could paint it with wax and stack it like firewood.
On the other side, NaOH (sodium hydroxide, or caustic soda, or lye) is also pretty easy to store. And the reactant to make NaOH out of sodium metal is water.
This wouldn't be the kind of battery that is set-it-and-forget-it like an EV battery, more of a sodium reactor - you dump solid sodium in the hopper, it melts and runs down into the cells, it converts to sodium hydroxide, and it makes power.
I kind of hate this now. It's a plane crash, it's sad, they're all sad. It was avoidable, they're all avoidable. This particular one shouldn't be that special, but once you hear the radio recording it's hard to shake it.
Sunday Energy Post #31: (It's Sunday in my timezone)
COAL POST
COAL POST
COAL POST
Okay so I hadn't mentioned coal until now for one really good reason: If you spend $10 on coal you get about 400kWh worth of coal. If you spend $10 on solar panels, you get about 100 watts of panels which will make 100-200kWh per year, for decades... And since electricity is more valuable than heat, you're probably getting more value in one year with the solar than you do (ever) from the coal.
However, last week I wrote about firewood and woodgas electricity and someone mentioned coal. The reason I brought up firewood is because many climates have an awkward period between around October and March when there is very little solar exposure and solar panels are pretty damned useless. Storing up the tens to hundreds of megawatt-hours of energy needed to get through those months is a real challenge - and most of my energy posts are on one way or another do to just that.
to be clear, if you have any reasonable amount of land, it's quite easy to get enough kWh per year to cover your yearly energy consumption - it's just that most of it comes in April-August and you need to store it up for October-March. The known ways to store it are mostly either:
1. Ridiculously expensive (e.g. 1/2 million dollars of batteries), or
2. Obscenely space demanding (e.g. 1200 cubic meters / 264,000 gallons of iron flow battery juice), or
3. Requiring of special geography / geology (e.g. pumped hydro ponds or underground salt caverns that can store compressed air or hydrogen)
Solutions like coal and firewood are where we give up on storage and accept buying in energy to bridge the winter gap. And the cheapest form of thermal energy seems to be coal.
Using US prices, coal is about 2.5 cents per kWh while firewood is about 5 cents. What you can do with them is largely the same, but there are a few unique twists.
A very promising application for coal is use in a wood gas generator such as the ones sold by https://www.thriveoffgrid.net/
According to their YT video, the ThriveOffGrid generator runs for about 2 hours on a full hopper of charcoal, generating about 5kW of power. Well coal has about 5x the volumetric energy density of charcoal - which anyone who ever picked up a bag of coal knows pretty well, there's a lot there.
If the ThriveOffGrid generator can make 5kW of power for 8 hours on a load of coal, this is pretty interesting, it's 40kWh of electrical power, which is about 2 days worth from my usage.
Now whether using coal, or charcoal, or wood, there is the question of how the heat is extracted and made available for home heating. In my previous post, I just casually proposed a "heat exchanger" that sends heat from the hot gas to the house. Of course heat exchangers are fairly costly and if you want an efficient one, they're even more costly. Moreover, they don't have any real heat *storage*, they just move heat from flow A to flow B.
Here I think we can do much better: Imagine a barrel, perhaps 2 meters (6 feet) in diameter and 3 meters (10 feet) tall. This barrel has a liquid drain at the bottom, a sprayer at the top, an exhaust vent at the top, and an intake vent at the bottom. Then it is filled top to bottom with crushed stone, and insulated from the heat and cold of the outside air. The exhaust gas flows in the bottom, and works its way up, depositing most of its heat on the stone. Cool water is rained down from the top, and warm water is drained out from the bottom.
This construct would be pretty simple and cheap to build, and it would be a HIGHLY effective heat scavenger, leaving the exhaust quite cold. Furthermore, it would also be able to *store* heat for some period of time since the stone can warm up and cool down.
Lastly, if the water that is sprayed on the stone has mixed in CaCO₃ (i.e. pulverized limestone), then this becomes equivalent to a commercial Scrubber - which removes sulfur from the coal exhaust.
Whatever your opinions about the environment may be, I don't think anyone wants to have the sulfur smell of burning coal around their home. So being able to scrub sulfur from the exhaust is a Nice Thing To Have, especially when it can be done using a component that is already present for other reasons.
I think in this configuration it makes sense to have one scrubber between the gas producer and the engine, and then a second one after the exhaust. The first one will get tar out of the gas and cool it down, while the second one will extract heat from the exhaust. Both will remove sulphur, helping improve the longevity of the internal combustion engine and improve the smell of the exhaust.
Warm water from the scrubbers should probably be heat-exchanged because it will be full of crap that's collected from the gas, but that just requires a fairly simple liquid/liquid heat exchanger. After that, the heat can go to in-floor heating or a ground-sourced heat pump, or some other heat user.
There are a couple of other applications for coal than simply to burn it. One interesting one is to upgrade it to methane gas or methanol. The methanol reaction is something I described in a past post, and it involves contributing additional hydrogen to the carbon of the coal and ending up with a liquid fuel. While this is interesting as it allows the coal to store additional summertime energy, there are other ways to store energy and I'm not sure it's THAT interesting. Also sulfur is quite destructive to methanol catalysts so it needs to be pretty much perfectly removed. Generally speaking, I don't think any of the other applications of coal are really worth it.
COAL POST
COAL POST
COAL POST
Okay so I hadn't mentioned coal until now for one really good reason: If you spend $10 on coal you get about 400kWh worth of coal. If you spend $10 on solar panels, you get about 100 watts of panels which will make 100-200kWh per year, for decades... And since electricity is more valuable than heat, you're probably getting more value in one year with the solar than you do (ever) from the coal.
However, last week I wrote about firewood and woodgas electricity and someone mentioned coal. The reason I brought up firewood is because many climates have an awkward period between around October and March when there is very little solar exposure and solar panels are pretty damned useless. Storing up the tens to hundreds of megawatt-hours of energy needed to get through those months is a real challenge - and most of my energy posts are on one way or another do to just that.
to be clear, if you have any reasonable amount of land, it's quite easy to get enough kWh per year to cover your yearly energy consumption - it's just that most of it comes in April-August and you need to store it up for October-March. The known ways to store it are mostly either:
1. Ridiculously expensive (e.g. 1/2 million dollars of batteries), or
2. Obscenely space demanding (e.g. 1200 cubic meters / 264,000 gallons of iron flow battery juice), or
3. Requiring of special geography / geology (e.g. pumped hydro ponds or underground salt caverns that can store compressed air or hydrogen)
Solutions like coal and firewood are where we give up on storage and accept buying in energy to bridge the winter gap. And the cheapest form of thermal energy seems to be coal.
Using US prices, coal is about 2.5 cents per kWh while firewood is about 5 cents. What you can do with them is largely the same, but there are a few unique twists.
A very promising application for coal is use in a wood gas generator such as the ones sold by https://www.thriveoffgrid.net/
According to their YT video, the ThriveOffGrid generator runs for about 2 hours on a full hopper of charcoal, generating about 5kW of power. Well coal has about 5x the volumetric energy density of charcoal - which anyone who ever picked up a bag of coal knows pretty well, there's a lot there.
If the ThriveOffGrid generator can make 5kW of power for 8 hours on a load of coal, this is pretty interesting, it's 40kWh of electrical power, which is about 2 days worth from my usage.
Now whether using coal, or charcoal, or wood, there is the question of how the heat is extracted and made available for home heating. In my previous post, I just casually proposed a "heat exchanger" that sends heat from the hot gas to the house. Of course heat exchangers are fairly costly and if you want an efficient one, they're even more costly. Moreover, they don't have any real heat *storage*, they just move heat from flow A to flow B.
Here I think we can do much better: Imagine a barrel, perhaps 2 meters (6 feet) in diameter and 3 meters (10 feet) tall. This barrel has a liquid drain at the bottom, a sprayer at the top, an exhaust vent at the top, and an intake vent at the bottom. Then it is filled top to bottom with crushed stone, and insulated from the heat and cold of the outside air. The exhaust gas flows in the bottom, and works its way up, depositing most of its heat on the stone. Cool water is rained down from the top, and warm water is drained out from the bottom.
This construct would be pretty simple and cheap to build, and it would be a HIGHLY effective heat scavenger, leaving the exhaust quite cold. Furthermore, it would also be able to *store* heat for some period of time since the stone can warm up and cool down.
Lastly, if the water that is sprayed on the stone has mixed in CaCO₃ (i.e. pulverized limestone), then this becomes equivalent to a commercial Scrubber - which removes sulfur from the coal exhaust.
Whatever your opinions about the environment may be, I don't think anyone wants to have the sulfur smell of burning coal around their home. So being able to scrub sulfur from the exhaust is a Nice Thing To Have, especially when it can be done using a component that is already present for other reasons.
I think in this configuration it makes sense to have one scrubber between the gas producer and the engine, and then a second one after the exhaust. The first one will get tar out of the gas and cool it down, while the second one will extract heat from the exhaust. Both will remove sulphur, helping improve the longevity of the internal combustion engine and improve the smell of the exhaust.
Warm water from the scrubbers should probably be heat-exchanged because it will be full of crap that's collected from the gas, but that just requires a fairly simple liquid/liquid heat exchanger. After that, the heat can go to in-floor heating or a ground-sourced heat pump, or some other heat user.
There are a couple of other applications for coal than simply to burn it. One interesting one is to upgrade it to methane gas or methanol. The methanol reaction is something I described in a past post, and it involves contributing additional hydrogen to the carbon of the coal and ending up with a liquid fuel. While this is interesting as it allows the coal to store additional summertime energy, there are other ways to store energy and I'm not sure it's THAT interesting. Also sulfur is quite destructive to methanol catalysts so it needs to be pretty much perfectly removed. Generally speaking, I don't think any of the other applications of coal are really worth it.
Tapping the sign...
This Titan submarine story is extremely frustrating.
To begin with, I kinda hate carbon fiber. Yes it's strong, yes it's light, but it can get micro-cracking, and delamination, and you can't see this stuff without some kind of radar thingy... And when those little micro-failures finally add up enough that the thing breaks, it's fucking instantanious.
Now in aviation I get it, weight is at SUCH a premium that even the pain in the ass bullshit you have to do to deal with a material that just wants to shoot you in the dick the second you turn your back on it might be worth it. If you've got a fleet in the sky, you can have someone put that radar thingamajig on it and look for internal delamination.
But for some safety-critical shit where weight doesn't matter? You're out of your mind to use carbon.
And even if you do, the one thing you never never never never NEVER do, under ANY circumstances, even if you have a gun to your head, is use carbon fiber for compression.
So what do these idiots do? They build a carbon fiber hull for a sub that's going to see 4000psi compression force 🤦♂️
Now weight kinda matters here because the submarine has to more or less float otherwise it's never coming back to the surface - but you can add buoyancy via foam or glass microspheres, or any manor of other crap that will improve the overall volume/weight of the thing, WITHOUT, making the part the people go in any lighter.
Other similar subs are made out of titanium spheres, IDGAF I'd have used 20 tons of steel, and then just added a bunch of foam around it so it'll still float...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gmfTRFt-WYw
To begin with, I kinda hate carbon fiber. Yes it's strong, yes it's light, but it can get micro-cracking, and delamination, and you can't see this stuff without some kind of radar thingy... And when those little micro-failures finally add up enough that the thing breaks, it's fucking instantanious.
Now in aviation I get it, weight is at SUCH a premium that even the pain in the ass bullshit you have to do to deal with a material that just wants to shoot you in the dick the second you turn your back on it might be worth it. If you've got a fleet in the sky, you can have someone put that radar thingamajig on it and look for internal delamination.
But for some safety-critical shit where weight doesn't matter? You're out of your mind to use carbon.
And even if you do, the one thing you never never never never NEVER do, under ANY circumstances, even if you have a gun to your head, is use carbon fiber for compression.
So what do these idiots do? They build a carbon fiber hull for a sub that's going to see 4000psi compression force 🤦♂️
Now weight kinda matters here because the submarine has to more or less float otherwise it's never coming back to the surface - but you can add buoyancy via foam or glass microspheres, or any manor of other crap that will improve the overall volume/weight of the thing, WITHOUT, making the part the people go in any lighter.
Other similar subs are made out of titanium spheres, IDGAF I'd have used 20 tons of steel, and then just added a bunch of foam around it so it'll still float...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gmfTRFt-WYw
💀1
We need to stop AI before it uses up the rest of the water 😱
My entire YT feed today is just Lear Jet, Lear Jet, Lear Jet...
But Veritasium just posted something really nice, when you cool helium down to near absolute zero, it gets really weird. Way weirder than I had thought... Worth a watch.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KfODG5REyss
But Veritasium just posted something really nice, when you cool helium down to near absolute zero, it gets really weird. Way weirder than I had thought... Worth a watch.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KfODG5REyss
Tammany Hall, except it's white men, and just like the Irish in the late 1800s we're single-issue voters: You give us jobs and you can do whatever you want.
