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CommieGIR posted:I want my battery to be a giant RTG. I wonder if this could be done for heating rather than electrical generation. It seems like skipping the generator piece would simplify any installation significantly but still have a substantial impact on emissions. Something like New York city's steam system for a new century.
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Dec 28, 2015 16:10
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AreWeDrunkYet posted:I wonder if this could be done for heating rather than electrical generation. It seems like skipping the generator piece would simplify any installation significantly but still have a substantial impact on emissions. Something like New York city's steam system for a new century. True, efficiency of RTGs is still less than 10% at best. Either way, you could do both, as Curiosity and Voyager have done before.
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Dec 28, 2015 16:38
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Mr Interweb posted:I also read that our power grid is pretty archaic and decrepit. What would it take to improve it? Would we have to tear down every energy tower/wiring and start from scratch? Or is there an easier way? Just FYI, but almost everyone's grids are archaic. Most countries have had significant portions in near continuous operation for 100+ years. Ours ain't decrepit though. AreWeDrunkYet posted:I wonder if this could be done for heating rather than electrical generation. It seems like skipping the generator piece would simplify any installation significantly but still have a substantial impact on emissions. Something like New York city's steam system for a new century. It'd be easier to just extend and build new steam systems rather than messing with RTGs for that.
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Dec 28, 2015 16:43
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fishmech posted:It'd be easier to just extend and build new steam systems rather than messing with RTGs for that. Steam ain't free, somethings gotta generate it 
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Dec 28, 2015 16:44
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LemonDrizzle posted:Potentially a dumb question, but are the world's lithium reserves large enough to make grid-scale storage (distributed or otherwise) based on Li-ion or Li-air batteries viable, especially if we're also massively ramping up battery production to go into cars? Lithium is a very common element, so it's essentially limitless as a resource. The problem is that most of it is thinly distributed, locked up in rocks or sea water with a low % lithium, making it inefficient and expensive to extract it. There are comparatively few deposits of high concentration (or cheap) lithium, which is what people talk about. Just like oil, as the cheap and easy deposits are used up gradually the more expensive sources will be tapped. So we will never run out, it's just a matter of how much the lithium is going to cost - and that will increase gradually as demand grows.
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Dec 28, 2015 16:57
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I wouldn't call something not even in the top 30 elements in crustal abundance "very common".
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Dec 28, 2015 23:37
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Irradiation posted:I wouldn't call something not even in the top 30 elements in crustal abundance "very common". Its actually very common, but its usually tied up with something else as a compound, because of its reactivity. And its most commonly found in brines and in ocean water.
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Dec 28, 2015 23:43
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Irradiation posted:I wouldn't call something not even in the top 30 elements in crustal abundance "very common". Its abundance is equivalent to cobalt and it's a higher percentage than lead or tin. The difference is that there are geologic processes that will concentrate other, rarer, elements into veins of high concentration. Lithium is spread out all over, with it being concentrated only rarely. People have been working on processes to extract it from sea water, for example. It's certainly doable technology and inexhaustible, just expensive compared to those few high-concentration spots.
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Dec 28, 2015 23:47
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I know how common it is. I just don't think calling an element with 0.0017 % crustal abundance "very common" is correct. It has the the same abundance as Niobium which the Royal Chemical Society considers "rare".
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Dec 29, 2015 00:03
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Irradiation posted:I know how common it is. I just don't think calling an element with 0.0017 % crustal abundance "very common" is correct. It has the the same abundance as Niobium which the Royal Chemical Society considers "rare". I guess I was thinking of common more in terms of "everywhere" than overall abundance. Any spadeful of dirt you dig up anywhere will have a measurable amount of lithium in it. It's everywhere, just in very small concentrations.
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Dec 29, 2015 00:07
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That really can be said of most elements though. Where I did my graduate work they used to do a lab experiment where you would collect dirt from the parking lot and then isolate the plutonium from atmospheric weapons testing. The NRC put a stop to that.
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Dec 29, 2015 00:25
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Deteriorata posted:I guess I was thinking of common more in terms of "everywhere" than overall abundance. Any spadeful of dirt you dig up anywhere will have a measurable amount of lithium in it. It's everywhere, just in very small concentrations. That makes it even harder to extract though. It would be much, much easier to extract it if the entire amount were concentrated in a few ore deposits you can just park mining equipment over instead of fractioning mountains of dirt to get a spoonful.
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Dec 29, 2015 11:01
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I CANNOT EJACULATE WITHOUT SEEING NATIVE AMERICANS BRUTALISED!
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blowfish posted:That makes it even harder to extract though. It would be much, much easier to extract it if the entire amount were concentrated in a few ore deposits you can just park mining equipment over instead of fractioning mountains of dirt to get a spoonful. Yeah, that was my initial point. There's lithium everywhere, but relatively few large (and easy to recover) concentrations of it. Thus we will never run out of it, it will just get more expensive.
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Dec 29, 2015 15:30
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Wasn't Google execs putting money towards an asteroid mining venture a few years ago? I remember there was a bunch of talk about getting one into Earth orbit with a ton of concentrated rare earth's.
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Dec 29, 2015 15:39
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Demiurge4 posted:Wasn't Google execs putting money towards an asteroid mining venture a few years ago? I remember there was a bunch of talk about getting one into Earth orbit with a ton of concentrated rare earth's. It's called Planetary Resources I think. There's a meaningful distinction between the abundance of a resource and what it costs to extract it though. It's irrelevant if an asteroid is solid gold if it costs more to acquire and mine it than it does to mine gold on Earth.
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Dec 29, 2015 20:21
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Yes, last I heard they were trying to establish a refueling station in lunar orbit using fuel processed on the moon. Then they'd use that to sell to other corporate space goers and use that money to recover our first asteroid. Come on over to the space thread if that interests you: http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3580990
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Dec 29, 2015 20:38
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Anosmoman posted:It's called Planetary Resources I think. There's a meaningful distinction between the abundance of a resource and what it costs to extract it though. It's irrelevant if an asteroid is solid gold if it costs more to acquire and mine it than it does to mine gold on Earth. Saw it into bits, drop bits on empty desert, pick slightly ablated bits out of craters? 
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Dec 29, 2015 20:43
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Anosmoman posted:It's called Planetary Resources I think. There's a meaningful distinction between the abundance of a resource and what it costs to extract it though. It's irrelevant if an asteroid is solid gold if it costs more to acquire and mine it than it does to mine gold on Earth. And also there's the problem that the material immediately looses most of it's value because you've flooded the market for gold/nickel-iron/industrial diamonds/whatever.
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Dec 29, 2015 21:35
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C.M. Kruger posted:And also there's the problem that the material immediately looses most of it's value because you've flooded the market for gold/nickel-iron/industrial diamonds/whatever. Only if you're actually making it available quickly enough to do that. You'll damage the value over the long term either way since you'll have a proven reserve that everyone knows about, but you won't necessarily tank the market if you aren't just taking a giant space rock's worth of resources and dumping them onto the planet all at once.
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Dec 29, 2015 22:07
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I always thought the main reason to mine asteroids is to use the materials in space, sending extra poo poo down to earth is just what you do at first to keep the lights on while you're building a few million O'Neil cylinders in vast clumps at the earth-moon lagrange points while the lunar mass driver shits up tons of mooncrete panels and moonglass.
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Dec 29, 2015 22:25
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Paradoxish posted:taking a giant space rock's worth of resources and dumping them onto the planet all at once. Doing that generally does cause rather direct damage to the market, along with most of the rest of the biosphere.
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Dec 29, 2015 22:40
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The asteroid mining fanboys always tend to overlook recovery or hand-wave it away as "we'll use the stuff in space because it'll be cheaper than sending materials from Earth" or "space elevator." But I figure what you do is clad your ingots in ceramic to keep them from melting on reentry, and put a rocket motor on them to break it down to a reasonable speed before it impacts. Or shape them like lifting bodies and put control surfaces/wings on so that they can be glided in to a "soft" landing. Then you limit the size so that there's only a effective yield of say, 25-50 kilotons if the breaking motor doesn't work. Of course the size will also be limited by your recovery vehicles since (assuming you're dropping them into the desert instead of hoping they float) a big prime mover like a HEMTT or MAZ-537 can only haul around 60-70 tons.
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Dec 30, 2015 11:02
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C.M. Kruger posted:The asteroid mining fanboys always tend to overlook recovery Yeah thats close to already a solved problem. If you've recovered the asteroid to LEO using In situ thrusters then the speeds at recovery are even lower then an apollo capsule. The handwaving you refer to is trying to shoot chucks from an asteroids native orbit strait into a reentry. Again, space megathread, check it out.
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Dec 30, 2015 18:26
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C.M. Kruger posted:And also there's the problem that the material immediately looses most of it's value because you've flooded the market for gold/nickel-iron/industrial diamonds/whatever. That's the opposite of a problem. The Hall-Heroult process made the price of aluminum crater, because it was now vastly cheaper to produce, but that didn't stop people from becoming very, very wealthy through producing and selling aluminum, because the lower price resulted in much greater demand; the stuff used to be reserved for the fancy cutlery you'd set out when heads of state came to visit, now we put soda in it and crumple it up and toss it away when we're done. That aside, moving between Earth and orbit is going to be difficult for the foreseeable future, even if all of SpaceX's reusability plans come to fruition. The market for "nickel-iron in orbit" is going to be different from the market for "nickel-iron on Earth."
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Dec 30, 2015 18:42
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Yeah, gold is actually an extremely useful element with all kinds of applications. And it looks cool, so you'd be meeting a lot of demand from people who otherwise can't afford the current price of gold Plus if you crater the price of gold then you gently caress over A) a bunch of goldbuggery libertarian fucktards and 2) those guys who scam old people by paying them pennies on the dollar for gold jewelry. That's a good thing in my book.
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Dec 30, 2015 20:19
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Crashing prices was kind of the point of the venture I think. Stuff like platinum and other noble metals used in poo poo like flat screens and smart phones being dirt cheap would spur new technological advances. Plus you'd have the extra benefit of bypassing the pollution. Imagine the kind of power storage and generation you could do if lithium was cheap and plentiful. Space exploration isn't a money maker, it's for eccentric weirdo's like Elon Musk throwing money at something because it's cool, not the rate of return.
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Jan 1, 2016 22:22
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Paradoxish posted:Only if you're actually making it available quickly enough to do that. You'll damage the value over the long term either way since you'll have a proven reserve that everyone knows about, but you won't necessarily tank the market if you aren't just taking a giant space rock's worth of resources and dumping them onto the planet all at once. All that means is that you now have a large amount of inventory, which means you still have a large amount of money locked up in your product. Either way, it's a very high capital investment and most people are going to want an ROI in a reasonable time frame.
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Jan 1, 2016 22:24
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I want to ask what might be a stupid question. I was reading just now about Google's new patent, on drone-like devices that are meant to siphon carbon dioxide out of seawater, and it mentioned that the devices also use electrolysis to break water down into hydrogen and oxygen. While I'm aware that there's a lot of water on the planet, so we're in no real danger of running out, is electrolysis a one-way trip? Is water that's turned into fuel via electrolysis permanently out of the water cycle?
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Jan 8, 2016 21:39
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Wanderer posted:I want to ask what might be a stupid question. Uh...no. When you burn hydrogen with oxygen you produce water.
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Jan 8, 2016 21:41
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Wanderer posted:I want to ask what might be a stupid question. Burning things involves oxygen. When you burn Hydrogen, you make water (vapor). Unless you trap the water, it will go into the atmosphere just like any other evaporated water.
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Jan 8, 2016 21:43
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computer parts posted:Burning things involves oxygen. When you burn Hydrogen, you make water (vapor). Unless you trap the water, it will go into the atmosphere just like any other evaporated water. Thank you. That's what I wanted to know. There are questions so stupid that Google isn't sure what to do with you, and that was one.
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Jan 8, 2016 21:50
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Wanderer posted:I want to ask what might be a stupid question. The only way to permanently remove water is by putting it somewhere you can't get to it or transmute its elements, like fusion. Anything else is reversible if you care to put enough energy into it.
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Jan 8, 2016 21:55
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Hypothetically, if we produced a lot of hydrogen and just released it into the atmosphere wouldn't it be blown off the planet by solar winds? I think I remember that happening to the early earth... Of course if something broke the hydrogen into ions in the upper atmosphere it could get stuck in bigger molecules before that happens.
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Jan 9, 2016 00:37
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Squalid posted:Hypothetically, if we produced a lot of hydrogen and just released it into the atmosphere wouldn't it be blown off the planet by solar winds? I think I remember that happening to the early earth... Of course if something broke the hydrogen into ions in the upper atmosphere it could get stuck in bigger molecules before that happens. Water and other molecules already dissociate due to UV light in the upper atmosphere, and do leak into space continuously. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_escape That's offset by micrometeorites and larger constantly bombarding the Earth, constantly adding new mass. I'd have to look up whether the net effect is positive or negative, and that would take effort so I won't.
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Jan 9, 2016 00:49
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If I recall correctly the earth actually adds some thousands of tons per year in dust and micrometeorites. Its a much larger number then you'd ever expect.
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Jan 9, 2016 01:52
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computer parts posted:Burning things involves oxygen. When you burn Hydrogen, you make water (vapor). Unless you trap the water, it will go into the atmosphere just like any other evaporated water. And that's where HYDRO-gen got its name. Water-forming. Also Earth's core would have to freeze and the magnetic field has to die before there's a net lost with the atompshere.
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Jan 9, 2016 04:29
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M_Gargantua posted:If I recall correctly the earth actually adds some thousands of tons per year in dust and micrometeorites. Its a much larger number then you'd ever expect. Gizmodo tells me Earth gains 40.000 tonnes, while losing another 95.000 tonnes, every year. edit: vvv huh, I had no idea :O Bates fucked around with this message at 18:36 on Jan 12, 2016 |
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Jan 9, 2016 09:25
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Gah, when you're speaking about tonnes just use MT (metric tons). Edit: Here's why, there a fuckload tons, long, short metric, gross (an internal volume unit), net (a dimensionless index), etc. Bar Ran Dun fucked around with this message at 06:39 on Jan 12, 2016 |
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Jan 12, 2016 06:31
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Tonnes is metric, tons is imperial.
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Jan 12, 2016 07:16
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OwlFancier posted:Tonnes is metric, tons is imperial. And metric tons (MT) is what tonnes are called by people who actually engage in moving tonnes of whatever poo poo from point a to point b. Whatever poo poo, includes fossil fuels like coal. This is because whatever poo poo is transported by vessel, and MT is the unit that matters for bills of lading, hydrostatic tables, and bunch of other calculations/paperwork vessel related. People in the real world call tonnes, Metric Tons.
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Jan 13, 2016 06:28
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