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from the worlds-first-commercial-electric-beaver dept.
The Guardian is reporting;
The world's first fully electric commercial aircraft has taken its inaugural test flight, taking off from the Canadian city of Vancouver and flying for 15 minutes.
"This proves that commercial aviation in all-electric form can work," said Roei Ganzarski, chief executive of Australian engineering firm magniX.
The company designed the plane's motor and worked in partnership with Harbour Air, which ferries half a million passengers a year between Vancouver, Whistler ski resort and nearby islands and coastal communities.
The recycled 62-year-old de Havilland Beaver seaplane is designed for short hops of 160 km or less, which represents the majority of Harbour Air flights. They're looking to save millions on costly maintenance and downtime. Harbour Air hopes to convert most of their airplanes after certification.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 13 2019, @06:48AM (1 child)
You're leaving out one critical components in your nuclear advocacy there: price.
Nuclear is plausible (I say plausible because once you factor in the build/decommissioning/'contingency' and other costs it's aggregate cost is not pretty even if its MW/h cost while operating is nice) right now because uranium is, relative to demand, widely and readily available. Should nuclear gain in popularity this would radically change. There is a lot of nuclear fuel in the world. For instance there's even uranium in seawater, but it's incredibly expensive to extract. Breeders also introduce other issues. They are both extremely expensive and extremely volatile. The greater level of enrichment offered by breeder reactors is the source of both of these issues. It results in greater deterioration and maintenance, and also means that an accident (which will happen at scale) could be catastrophic. The greater level of enrichment also means reactors could be used, or easily modified, to produce weapons grade nuclear material.
No idea what you're talking about in terms of US reserves either. We definitely do not have stockpiles of uranium. Uranium is primarily relegated to Eastern Europe, Africa, and Australia. 'Mideast 2.0'.
Anyhow the long and short there is that the overall price is going to skyrocket if nuclear becomes the norm for energy production. So it's somewhat self defeating unless you ignore this, which companies who advocate for nuclear are very much willing to do because they'd effectively be too big to fail and could rely on the government ensuring they don't fail. Higher costs tend to result in higher justifiable profit margins so it's win-win for them. The only loser would be the consumer who sees their electric bill or price at the electro-pump go up, up, and away.
Alternative? Again, solar. The intermittentcy of the power is not an issue. You have 'kumbaya' solutions like world-wide high energy direct voltage current lines meaning there is never a nighttime, but you also have local solutions like artificial hydro-electric. I fully agree (with the unstated but implied comment) that batteries are not a viable solution at scale, but that's hardly an issue.
(Score: 2) by The Shire on Friday December 13 2019, @09:45PM
The vast majority of the cost of nuclear plants comes from red tape associated with the plants layouts. Westinghouse figured out a way past that buy designing a modular plant called the AP1000. Four of them have been built and connected to the grid in China already where they were fast tracked. In the US, two such reactors ended up getting canceled because, unlike China, it's become a national sport for tree huggers to tie these plants up in court. Even so, per megawatt, it's actually cheaper to build nuclear than it is to build offshore wind turbines. Weird right?
As for fuel stockpiles you have to remember that only 5% of the uranium in a fuel rod is actually "burned" before being pulled and sent for processing. So just in the fuel reprocessing sector alone you have about 20 times as much fuel as our reactors are currently using. But more importantly, newer reactor designs like you would see if we fast tracked nuclear, are much more efficient. When you get to the Gen4 reactors like the LFTR you're talking about a 95% burn rate and that's using Thorium 232 as the fuel. In fact, India plans to have 50 such thorium reactors online by 2025. And thorium does not require enrichment nor is it particularly radioactive and we have massive amounts of it all around the country. Ironically, many of the mine sites we would normally develop for the rare earths used in all our electronics are not exploited because they contain large amounts of thorium which the NRC regulates. So allowing such mining to take place has a dual benefit. And of course there is also the enormous number of nuclear weapons that get decomissioned as they age. Weapons grade uranium has to actually be diluted in order to work in a reactor. Bottom line - just in the US there is more than enough nuclear fuel to power as many reactors as you care to build for as long as you need.
I know people love to embrace solar as the utopian green power source but people ignore the downsides. It requires huge amounts of land to viable, so you're basically going out and strip mining vast tracks of land and planting these panels there. The damage to the ecosystem would be astronomical. I saw a study that said if England wanted to meet it's power needs with solar it would have to convert 1/4 of their entire land mass to it. And roof top solar is no answer. It helps, but when you throw an electric car in the mix you're talking about a roof top install taking three days to recharge your car. And then there's the failure rate - chinese panels last only about 5 years. Can you imagine the scope of the problem of disposing/recycling that many panels every 5 years? Never mind the toxicity of the chemicals they contain, or the chemicals required for their manufacture. Hell, if you think Uranium is scarce - trying to build enough panels to fill the gap left by fossil fuels, it just can't be done. We dont have the materials or the manufacturing capacity to handle it.
Clearly I'm pretty enthusiastic about nuclear but I think the points are compelling. Pushing renewables is admirable, but nuclear is the only emissions free energy source that reasonably be expected to replace fossil fuels over the next 50 years. I see no reason why we shouldn't be fast tracking both.