Thinking about Better Place’s EV infrastructure proposals.

For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.
— Richard Feynman

Better Place has attracted a lot of publicity recently, including on the Today Show and in the New York Times, following their agreement with AGL Energy and Macquarie Capital Group to raise one billion Australian dollars (about USD $665 million) to build a network of electric-vehicle battery infrastructure across Australia.

Better Place’s model offers a network of battery stations, just like petrol stations, at which an attendant will swap out an electric vehicle’s discharged Li-ion battery for a newly recharged one.

Drivers belonging to a monthly subscription service gain unlimited access to Better Place stations and fully-charged batteries for their cars. While electric-car owners can still charge their cars at home, a series of stations gives them more flexibility to travel long distances despite a battery’s limited range.

These are the biggest challenges to electric vehicle adoption – even the very best electrochemical batteries give a relatively low limit to the maximum range, they take a long time to recharge, there’s no infrastructure for recharging on the go, the batteries have finite lifetimes, and they’re very expensive. There’s only so much energy you can store in a given amount of battery of any particular chemical composition, and there’s a limit to the rate at which you can pour energy back into the battery in practice – these barriers are not things you can easily get around with politics and marketing.

The Tesla Roadster, as an example of one of the few battery electric vehicles on the consumer market today for which plug-to-wheel energy consumption data is easy to find, consumes 199 Watt-hours per km. In February 2008, Tesla Motors reported that, after testing a Validation Prototype of the Tesla Roadster at an EPA-certified location, that those tests yielded a range of 220 miles (354 km) and a plug-to-wheel efficiency of 199 Wh/km. (Admittedly, the Tesla is probably sacrificing a little energy efficiency for the sake of performance, meaning that it could probably be possible to deliver better energy consumption in a vehicle designed with that consideration in mind.) I’ll use the Tesla Roadster as a specific example, mainly because such technical details of it are easy to find.

The battery in the Tesla takes 3.5 hours to charge from zero charge, and stores 53 kWh of energy. Efficiency of the charging electronics is 86%, so 62 kWh of electricity is needed for a single charge.

If you just plug in the vehicle to charge it, and it consumes 62 kWh to charge the battery, and charges in 3.5 hours, then the line power supply to the charger must supply 74 A at 240 V (AC RMS) or 144 A, on a 120 V grid. Those are very large currents, far in excess of the maximum capacity of 10 to 15 A or thereabout that we associate with standard domestic power circuits.

If you were to just plug in such a vehicle into a household electricity line socket to charge it, (at 10 A at 240 V), then a 12 hour charge would correspond to a range of 164 kilometers, or a round trip of 82 kilometers.

If you need to travel further than that in a day, then clearly “charging stations” like the Better Place model, or some kind of provision for high-current power supplies to charge the vehicles, needs to be available. In principle, at least, the Better Place business model sounds like a good idea.

The service also saves drivers time, according to the company, since Better Place attendants can swap out a battery in about three minutes, versus the few hours it takes to recharge a battery.

Keeping in mind that electricity is only as clean as its energy source, Better Place claim that their stations will purportedly recharge their stocks of batteries using electricity from renewable energy systems.

Better Place proudly proclaims that “We will build an electric vehicle network capable of supporting the switch of Australia’s 15 million gas cars to zero emission vehicles.” and that “AGL will provide all of the renewable energy—from wind and other sources—needed to power the electric vehicles and work with Better Place to optimize the network.”

The total ‘renewable’ electricity generation in Australia in 2007 was 20.964 TWh, almost all of which (14.722 TWh) is hydroelectricity.
[Source]

So, if all of Australia’s current renewable energy generation, across all energy utilities – which is already used, already traded for “carbon credit”, and sold to “green power” customers – was used to power Australia’s 15 million passenger cars, assuming that they were all replaced by battery electric vehicles, then there is only enough renewable electricity generation at present for each car to travel an average of 19.2 kilometers per day, assuming that only “renewable” energy, i.e. hydroelectricity, and solar, wind, tidal or biofuel generated electricity was used to power 15 million BEVs, and that every bit of electricity generated from these systems in this country was dedicated exclusively to this use.

In 1991, cars in Australia travelled an average of 14,600 km [source], or 40 km per day. If this level of car use was maintained today (unfortunately I cannot find any newer statistics), then total renewable energy generation would have to be multiplied 2.1 times from present levels – assuming all cars were replaced with BEVs and that all the renewable electricity generation was used exclusively for charging the BEVs, and no fossil-fuel-generated electricity was used. I don’t think I really need to convince anybody that any real expansion of hydroelectricity is not something that is at all foreseeable nor really practical in Australia.

Simply muttering the magic word “renewables” three times and clicking your heels, or something, isn’t grounds for conjuring up an arbitrarily large quantity of cleanly generated electrical energy – the infrastructure has actually got to be put in place to generate that corresponding quantity of energy.

The entrepreneur wasted no time comparing the east coast of Australia, where Better Place will build “electric highways” connecting Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane, to the West Coast of the U.S. where Agassi would like to do the same between L.A., San Francisco and Seattle. The greater Melbourne-Sydney metro area will require 200,000 to 250,000 charging stations, Agassi said. Better Place plans on deploying some 500,000 charging points for the whole of Israel.

Under the plan, the three cities will each have a network of between 200,000 and 250,000 charge stations by 2012 where drivers can plug in and power up their electric cars.

If you have 250,000 charging stations (I’m not sure if they mean 250,000 total for the east coast, or 200,000 to 250,000 each in each of those three cities.) and 21 TWh per year of renewable energy, then that’s only enough for each charging station to be able to recharge three batteries per day, which is obviously completely insufficient. (1 day * (21 TWh per year) / (250,000 * 62 kWh) = 3.7)

In practice, burning one litre of petrol in an automotive engine results in emission of 2.32 kilograms of carbon dioxide per litre. Obviously, better fuel economy means better CO₂ emissions economy per kilometer.

In Australia, the average GHG emissions intensity for electricity generation is 1000 gCO₂/kWh. (In Victoria, it’s obscene, about 1300-1400 gCO₂/kWh.) The Tesla Roadster has a plug-to-wheel efficiency of 199 Wh/km. Therefore, the equivalent CO₂ emission for the Tesla Roadster is about 20 kg CO₂/100 km.

So, if you can have a petrol-burning IC engine car with a fuel economy equal to 8.62 L per 100 km or better, then in terms of CO₂ emissions, it is equally as good as, or better than, such an electric vehicle. In brown-coal-powered Victoria, the point of equivalence is about 11 to 12 litres per 100 km – which basically all cars surpass, at present.

8.62 L per 100 km is 27.3 miles per gallon – so that’s approximately equal to the old CAFE standard for cars in the USA, which I’m pretty sure was 27.5 MPG, and significantly worse than the newer standard of 35 miles per gallon. It is totally practical to build cars with such a degree of fuel economy.

Whilst in principle electric vehicles are a good idea particularly in the long term, we have to realise that right now, given the current state of electricity generation in Australia, the number one priority, in terms of mitigating excessive anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases, has got to be the replacement of fossil fuel based electricity generation with non-polluting systems.

While we’re implementing that, I also think that improving the fuel efficiency of ICE cars and vehicles is just as easy, probably more cost effective, and capable of delivering an equal degree of improvement in the environmental intensity of the transport sector, at least in the near term, until the coal-fired electricity generators start being replaced.

Robert Merkel over at Larvatus Prodeo posted a good post on the same topic recently.

I’ll leave you with a quote from Merkel – I couldn’t agree more with this:

If I were a government minister receiving a visit from Better Place and its partners for some kind of government incentive, I’d look very long and hard at the environmental benefits we’ll get for the dough they’re asking for.

Just like solar panels, I’d expect the answer to come back – lots of money for bugger-all environmental gains. And that should be the bottom line, not slick PR campaigns that suck in a gullible mainstream media.

A brief point about nuclear fusion devices.

It’s a common misconception that controlled nuclear fusion in a device like a magnetic confinement reactor such as ITER requires you to heat the material up to a temperature of hundreds of millions of degrees.

That’s a little bit of a subtle issue, and in the context of the everyday, familiar notion of temperature, it’s kind of complicated. It’s a plasma temperature, an ion temperature. The Lawson product is minimised for a plasma temperature of 25 keV, for deuterium-tritium fusion, so that’s the optimum plasma temperature of the DT plasma in the reactor. Having such a plasma at such an effective temperature doesn’t really compare to materials being heated up in our familiar everyday experience.

In a colour TV, for example, (The CRT kind, not the newfangled kinds) the electrons are accelerated across a potential of approximately 25 kV – the electrons are accelerated to an energy of 25 keV, corresponding to a effective “temperature” of 290 million K. But clearly the TV tube isn’t heated up to a temperature of 290 million K in the conventionally familiar sense.

Another blogger for nuclear energy.

Channelling the Strong Force is another new blog focussed on the worldwide nuclear power renaissance and associated issues. Not much content so far, but that’s OK, since it’s brand new, and we’ll see more interesting content in the future. It’s certainly interesting discourse so far.

“The key to our future liberty is the shattering of the prison walls of electron-shell energy levels.”

Hmm, I like that.

(Yes, the post title is shamelessly copied from our friends at NEI Nuclear Notes.)

Health physics implications of the ionisation smoke detector.

It’s still occasionally heard from some sources, even after the technology has been in widespread use for many, many years, that the common household ionisation smoke detectors, which contain a very small radioactive source, present some kind of health hazard.
They don’t.

Such devices usually contain a sealed source, of 0.9 to 1.0 μCi of Americium-241. The source itself is a tiny little thing, about three millimeters in diameter – it’s a point source. *

²⁴¹Am principally decays by emission of an alpha particle at 5.49 MeV, but this is not of any significance, since the α-particle cannot escape the device at all. However, ²⁴¹Am also emits some low-energy gamma photons as it decays, principally a gamma ray of 59 keV, and it is this γ-radiation that can pass through the device and conceivably result in some dose to the householder, possibly.

The specific gamma-ray dose constant (“Γ factor”) for ²⁴¹Am is 0.314 rem m² Ci^-1 h^-1, or 3.14 x 10^-9 Sv m² μCi^-1 h^-1

(Here’s my source, a useful little reference table for this type of health physics information for several common, important, industrial, scientific and technical radionuclides.)

The dose rate, then, to the whole body from an external exposure to a point radioactive source which is emitting photon radiation is just the Γ-factor for the particular nuclide, multiplied by the activity of the source, multiplied by the familiar old inverse-squared distance term.

Suppose you’ve got such a detector on the ceiling, right next to your bed, which would place you about , say, 3 m away from the source. Suppose, additionally, that you spend your entire life in that bed. Of course, here I’m taking the most conservative scenario possible, to set an upper bound on the plausible dose.

3.14 x 10^-9 Sv m² μCi^-1 h^-1 x 1 μCi x 8765.8 hours x (3 m)^-2 = 3.06 microsieverts per year.

Of course, the average worldwide dose from natural background radiation is almost 1000 times that – around 2.4 to 3 millisieverts per year, and in some places, far, far higher.

However, there is a more surprising and interesting context that we can put such a dose rate in. If you sleep in bed next to your partner every night, then the ionising radiation dose that you receive, due to the radioactivity of your partner’s body, from ⁴⁰K and things like that, is about five microsieverts per year. [Source]

That’s assuming a realistic amount of sleep each day, of course – if you were actually in bed 24 hours per day, the dose from this source would be three times as much; 15 μSv per year.

Thus – the dose from sleeping next to your partner is 4.9 times what it is from the smoke detector. Surprising, isn’t it?

Obviously there is no reason to expect any significant health physics implications of any kind at such extremely low doses. Heck, such low doses are probably even too small to have potential significance with regards to radiation hormoesis. But we do know they’re proven to be extremely effective at protecting against the threat of fire destroying your home.

* Just as an aside, although technically illegal in the US and possibly in other localities as well, people (usually physicists and people that do know what they’re doing) do often remove these sources, and use them for educational demonstrations of radioactivity, of Geiger-Marsden style scattering, charged particle absorption, and to test and calibrate alpha and X-ray detectors – it’s quite tempting, since these devices are far, far less expensive than purchasing exactly the same sort of tiny sealed radioactive sources through “proper” channels, and no more dangerous.

Uranium chemistry, and some interesting blogs to check out.

Special Nuclear Material is a great blog containing lots of interesting stuff. (Though it’s not really energy and nuclear energy related.)
It was this post on uranium chemistry that I found the blog via, and which I found really interesting.

Incredibly interesting, informative stuff. I’m impressed that he’s done all that inorganically, with no solvent extraction, and got good uranium selectivity, at least as far as you can tell from looking at pictures of the stuff.

Some people out there in the public might be alarmed by the fact that you can actually pull this off, all the way to UF₄, in your basement. I’m not alarmed at all, I think it’s really impressive.

What alarms me a little more is that they actually sell moderately concentrated hydrofluoric acid to any idiot who walks into a store, in the US. (No disrespect to US citizens, in general, is intended or implied in the slightest here, of course.) I’m surprised that CPSC doesn’t absolutely freak out. (Maybe they will, if they find out that terrorists could use the stuff for dreaded nooklear purposes, though…)
God forbid if you actually want to buy psuedoephedrine cold pills or lye or something, though.

The portable BGO probe made from a subdivided part of a PET scanner – one of the PMTs and one corresponding small part of the array of BGO crystals – is very nice, too.

Whilst on the subject of blogs, I’m happy to give a shout out to Pro Nuclear Democrats as well. As they say, energy, energy security and the environment are not partisan issues.

Fossil fuel karma?

A perhaps slightly ironic warning of the potential perils of the mining of coal on a massive scale.

ABANDONED MINE IMPERILS HOME OF EX-LEGISLATOR
Friend of coal becomes its victim

An abandoned coal mine is causing an Eastern Kentucky hillside to slide slowly onto the home of former state Rep. Howard Cornett, R-Whitesburg, who championed coal companies in the legislature.

The “continual flow” of water from the abandoned mine has saturated Cornett’s yard and the foundation of his home, according to Steve Hohmann, director of the Division of Abandoned Mine Lands. Parts of the hill are sliding down, putting the house at risk.

Long a defender of coal companies’ interests, Cornett lost his seat after he unsuccessfully pushed a bill to allow more overweight trucks on state roads, angering his constituents who considered such trucks dangerous. In fiery speeches, Cornett said his opponents wanted to destroy the coal industry.

Something that gets on my nerves.

Do you know what bugs me quite a bit sometimes?

People using the ionizing radiation trefoil warning symbol as though it’s some kind of symbol that represents nuclear power.

The press / media are often quite bad in this regard. I know, this seems pretty trivial, but I just wanted to say it.

Detecting a nuclear fission reactor at the centre of the Earth.

Some months ago I wrote a post discussing Marvin Herndon’s controversial theory regarding a nuclear fission reactor, a “georeactor”, at the molten core of the Earth. One point I noted is that it should be entirely practical to falsify such a theory, to test it, to prove the existence of and to study the characteristics of such a nuclear reactor, by simply studying the flux of neutrinos (electron antineutrinos, specifically) from inside the Earth.

Here’s an interesting paper I found discussing just that.

Of course, the usual cautions regarding ArXiv preprint material apply – it is not peer-reviewed, and should be treated with skeptical scrutiny and caution.

Ultimately, the best possible site for a geo-reactor search is Hawaii (panel d) in Fig. 1). This option requires however, construction of a new excavated laboratory. In Hawaii, situated entirely on the oceanic crust with very low geo-U/Th. only the small signal from U/Th deep in the Mantle is visible. The remoteness from populated continents on either side reduces the power reactor signals to a comfortably low level.

With these considerations in mind, I wonder if the IceCube experiment at the South Pole wouldn’t be a much more useful detector site, with perhaps the best possible isolation from manmade reactors as well as geological U/Th radioactivity as you could possibly get? Not to mention the fact that the detector itself already exists, and doesn’t need to be constructed.

A Friend’s Path to Nuclear Power

Here’s a very thoughtful piece, written by the author of A Musing Environment. Certainly an article that is worth reading.

The October 2008 Friends Journal focuses on Energy, Climate, and Building Community, and includes my article, A Friend’s Path to Nuclear Power.

I’m not going to pretend to know much of anything about Quakerism, but of course they certainly care deeply about peace, human welfare and environmental sustainability, like we all do, really. This is a very thoughtful, well researched, well argued and passionate article on one person’s investigation of the importance of nuclear energy in improving human welfare.

The Bomb That Fell On Niagara: The Sphere

Feel like reading something really, really stupid? This seems appropriate.

It’s pretty obvious that if it looks like an ammonia gas tank, quacks like a gas tank, and they say it’s a gas tank, then it’s probably a gas tank.

It certainly doesn’t look like any early prototype of any nuclear reactor design I’ve ever heard of.

Almost 4,000 tons of radioactive radium-226, the largest repository in the western hemisphere, representing a staggering quantity of radiation.

4000 tons of radium!? In 1937, radium cost $25,000 per gram. That’s, uh, 91 trillion dollars, in 1937 US dollars, anyway.

There is also polonium-210 on site. According to Bob Nichols, a San Francisco-based researcher and writer who reviewed the same documents as Weyman, polonium was used as a trigger in nuclear weapons. Its presence in quantities sufficient to detect all these years and half-lives later is not easily explained by the KAPL wastes.

It ought to be obvious where any Po-210 comes from – it’s a daughter product of radium, and it’s present in secular equilibrium where ever there is radium present. In fact, given the quite short 138-day half-life of Po-210, the decay of radium is indeed the only possible source of any Po-210 detectable on the site today.